The Brother/Sister Plays

At 29 (a tween in dramatist years), Tarell Alvin McCraney is riding a mighty wave, with multiple productions Off Broadway and in London, not to mention a $25,000 check from the Steinberg Playwright Awards last month. Now the Public Theater gives him almost five hours of high-quality production time for The Brother/Sister Plays, a trilogy of works in repertory. Since McCraney favors aqueous metaphors, we must ask: Does he sink or swim?

There is great vitality, musicality and verbal invention in McCraney’s abstract, Louisiana-set fables, imbued (by his own account) with the oral traditions of Yoruban culture. Characters speak their own stage directions (“Ogun goes back under the car”; “Oya watches her mother”) which may be fresh to some viewers but is a familiar metatheatrical device. The folksy material is abstract yet earthy; dream sequences and lyrical monologues rub elbows with ribald humor. Children come of age, and old women dispense wisdom. In the Red and Brown Water is the story of Oya (Kianné Muschett), a high-school track star whose dreams are dashed by a white talent scout; she then fixates on having a baby with a seductive philanderer (Sterling K. Brown). The subsequent plays return to the characters years later as they grow older and have children. The Brothers Size is a three-way struggle between mismatched but loving siblings, one of whom was in prison and formed a deep friendship with a fellow inmate. The last, Marcus; or the Secret of the Sweet, depicts a melancholy gay teen (André Holland) who wants to find out if his father was also “sweet” (or gay). Everyone longs for connection and roots, to see themselves reflected in a baby or a lover or a community.

Such desires could ostensibly lead to drama, but McCraney overwrites terribly, and his fusion of African and American folkways undermines both. He aims for archetypes but ends up with shrill, verbose stereotypes, wandering through a vague mythopoetic landscape. Tina Landau and Robert O’Hara stage their sections movement-theater style, eliciting passionate performances from an appealing cast. (At its worst, though, the group gestures and choral speaking come across like a poor tribute to Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater.) McCraney is undeniably talented but also self-indulgent; he needs dramaturgical focus and concision, not more awards.—David Cote

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