The Brothers Size/Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet

Last night I took in the other half of the McCarter Theater's production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays. This half consisted of two short plays: The Brothers Size and Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet. Both of these plays were also set deep in the Louisiana bayou, among African-American characters who are a mixture of Creole and Yoruba, and have connections to the old ways even though they live in contemporary U.S.A.

The better of the two plays, and the best of the trilogy, is The Brothers Size. It most strictly adheres to the unities of time and space, and limits the fanciful nature of McCraney's writing, which I appreciated. It has three characters, two of them the brothers of the title. Ogun Size owns an auto-body shop, while his younger brother Oshoosi is just out of prison. They live together with a certain tension, and Ogun basically forces his brother to work at the shop. Oshoosi's friendship with Elegba, who can't seem to avoid staying out of trouble, leads to a crisis, and the two men realize the age-old maxim that blood is thicker than water.

The acting is quite good here, especially by Marc Damon Johnson as Ogun. He appears as that character in all three plays. Oshoosi is played by Brian Tyree Henry. The direction of both plays is by Robert O'Hara.

The second play, Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet, is less successful, but presumably is a far more personal play for McCraney. The title character, Elegba's son, is a fifteen-year-old boy coming to grips with his homosexuality. He is played by Alano Miller, who also plays Elegba, and he perfectly captures the confusion and fear that must go through a young man in a conservative community would go through.

However, there are certain amateurish touches of the play that weigh it down. Coincidentally I'm reading a book now by novelist Julian Barnes in which he mentions that in his first novel he made a point of not describing two things: dreams and the weather, as they are both overworked in fiction. McCraney's play relies heavily on both, as Marcus has a persistent dream of a man walking in a rainstorm, and during the action of the play a hurricane is bearing down on the area (is it Katrina? I don't recall the name being mentioned, but I got the impression that it was that storm). This leads to a lot of lumbering metaphors and hackneyed writing.

After seeing all three of his plays its clear that McCraney is a talent, but still has to shed some youthful (he's under thirty) quirks. Is he going to have his characters speak aloud stage directions in all of his plays? Is he capable of writing about people from other locales? He's certainly a writer to keep an eye on.