The Return of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Masterpiece, “The Brothers Size”

At the beginning of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s poetic drama “The Brothers Size,” now at the Shed, one of the play’s three actors pours white sand—or is it salt?—in a circle on the otherwise empty stage. This ceremonial ring becomes an in-the-round playing area, and, as the performers enter and exit it, their feet scuff the particles, sending dust up to drift in the light.

Two of the men are brothers, bickering in their shared Louisiana home: the irrepressible Oshoosi Size (Alani iLongwe), who has only recently returned from prison, and his strict older sibling, Ogun Size (André Holland), who can’t stop hassling him. The heat is stultifying, and Oshoosi, still on probation, is “just trying to live easy”—but Ogun wants his brother up early, working in Ogun’s car shop, pulling his weight, avoiding the law. A third man, the alluring Elegba (Malcolm Mays), makes their two-body system even more unstable. Oshoosi dearly needed Elegba’s friendship in prison, but, outside it, he seems a bit too dangerous, a bit too knowing.

McCraney’s characters do occasionally know things beyond themselves; they may not exist merely in the here and now. Ogun, Oshoosi, and Elegba are all the names of Yoruba orishas—Ogun is the deity of iron and war, Oshoosi is associated with the hunt, and the trickster Elegba opens the gates between worlds. As the three men narrate their story, they also dance (Juel D. Lane is the choreographer), leaping over one another or lining up for a synchronized number—part polyrhythmic stepping, part game of tag—accompanied by an onstage drummer (Munir Zakee). Sometimes the characters speak their own stage directions and offer their own metaphors. “Elegba enters, drifting, like the moon,” Mays says of his character’s gleaming and magnetic presence, which exerts a pull on Oshoosi that waxes and wanes.

McCraney, who is the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse, in L.A., is most widely known for writing “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” an unpublished play that became the source for “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning film, from 2016, about a queer Black boy whose friend both reaches for and betrays him. (In a sequence of the film set in adulthood, Holland, a frequent collaborator of McCraney’s, plays that seductive friend.)

To the theatre world, though, it was “The Brothers Size” that made McCraney’s name. In 2007, when he was still a playwriting student at Yale, the Under the Radar festival and the Foundry Theatre decided to bring “The Brothers Size,” originally performed as a class assignment in 2005, to New York’s Public Theatre. The play, which McCraney composed as part of a larger series called “The Brother/Sister Plays,” was an instant hit at the festival; it joined the Public’s regular season later that year, and was also produced in London, where it was nominated for an Olivier. In many ways, the show at the Shed feels like a return. McCraney is co-directing alongside Bijan Sheibani, who directed the London début as well as a version of this production at the Geffen last year. And certainly some of its most striking elements—such as the sand circle—have survived all the way from the Yale première, which was directed by McCraney’s classmate Tea Alagić.

Back then, “The Brothers Size” was a youthful shout, an opening salvo from a writer in his twenties who would clearly go on to do important things. That sense of stardom-on-the-cusp extended to the actors involved: Brian Tyree Henry came with the show from Yale to Under the Radar as the production’s Oshoosi, and a (then) little-known Holland played Elegba in a 2009 remounting, again at the Public. The play’s combination of rapid-fire fraternal shit-talking and word-drunk monologues set off actors’ individual talents the way black velvet sets off pearls.

It felt fresh in other ways, too. A few dramas that decade had touched on incarceration—Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” for instance—but none had dealt so evocatively with probation. “The Brothers Size,” by blurring the boundaries between dream and waking, makes us feel Oshoosi’s legal purgatory, an existence that is simultaneously free and not free. To keep the audience in a similar limbo, the play suggests existential fluidity: Oshoosi believes he has a doppelgänger somewhere in Madagascar (“I need to be out there looking for the ‘me’s,” he says), and when Elegba takes Oshoosi down to the bayou—a landscape half land, half water—he reminds him of the erotic liberty they found together . . . in prison.

Twenty years have done something wonderful to McCraney’s play. It now feels more like an assured masterpiece than the first work of a prodigy; here, polished to a deep lustre, is the finest exertion of McCraney’s talents, elevated by a cast with staggering gifts. Holland’s self-effacing tiredness as Ogun is deliberately unshowy, and, while the actor’s name appears above the title in the program, he cedes the limelight to both Mays, who gives the graceful, flirtatious performance of a lifetime, and to iLongwe, who grows more radiant and funny as Oshoosi’s frustration with his brother sharpens. A certain inelegant hastiness in the plot has been resolved by treating the monologues almost as arias, giving them each an equal sense of grandeur, like the relentless finale of a fireworks display.

There is a little danger in the speed and ease of the actors’ speech, since it can be easy to mishear them amid McCraney’s slippery wordplay. But even that bewitched me. When Elegba tells Ogun about the terror Oshoosi endured in prison at night, he demonstrates how he reached out to him. “You know not where the hand will lead you,” Elegba says. “If it’s the good guard lead you back to your cell . . . if it ain’t . . . ” Mays inflects Elegba’s speech with Creole syncopation, and I heard him say “the good god” rather than “the good guard.” I had been pondering that image—heartbroken Elegba unsure if he is a good god or a bad one—for a full day before I was corrected by the script. But “The Brothers Size” has room for that sort of thing. Every thought is brother to another.

If all that fraught masculinity in midtown is too much for you, the divine feminine is hanging out downtown at the Performing Garage in the shape of “Honor,” one of the artist Suzanne Bocanegra’s superb slide-lecture-style performances. The show, originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, consists of one woman’s discursive, often hilarious presentation, nominally on the museum’s sixteenth-century “Honor” tapestry, a “Where’s Waldo?”-style allegorical array of nearly seventy characters, including Judith, Penelope, and Constantine. Really, though, Bocanegra’s show explores the issues that the tapestry raises in her magpie mind—women as symbols of virtue; state torture and its associated spectacle; a Texas beauty pageant. Rather than speak to us directly, Bocanegra (a Rome Prize-winning artist herself) sits to one side of the stage, murmuring the text into a microphone. Meanwhile, the actor Lili Taylor channels her from center stage, reciting what she hears in her earpiece and advancing the slides.

“Honor” reminds me of the old John Berger television series “Ways of Seeing,” from the BBC—it shifts your gaze from the art work to the museum wall, and then to the social structure behind the wall. Sometimes Bocanegra accomplishes this by zooming in for a closeup on material innovation (the anonymous weavers of “Honor” created slashes in the fabric to make mouths), or by describing the development of her own art passions, from the Girl Scouts to her youthful obsession with Hansel and Gretel to the crucified Jesus in her childhood church. Taylor’s voice varies in degrees of remove from droll to dry, but she’s often telling us about suffering: the Girl Scouts’ founder’s marital humiliation; the Grimms’ fairy-tale children abandoned to starvation in the woods; Christ in torment. Somehow all these threads gather together in a video of Bocanegra’s mother, her first sewing teacher, busily crocheting in an armchair. That video, Taylor says—dispassionately, kindly, smiling a little—was taken shortly before Bocanegra’s mother died. No wonder the artist needs a second self to speak to us. Grief makes a hole, but memory makes a stitch. ♦