The Brothers Size ★★★★★

Tarell Alvin McCraney is back in town, and man alive, he is both welcome and needed. The Oscar-winning screenwriter and much-lauded playwright is directing (with Bijan Sheibani) a superb revival of The Brothers Size, the second of the three works from The Brother/Sister Plays, his series of interconnected plays loosely drawn from West African myths and set in mythical San Pere, Louisiana. First performed when McCraney was in graduate school, The Brothers Size — with its piercing questions about incarceration, rehabilitation, and the lack of public spaces where Black men can relax — still feels utterly relevant today, and this 20th-anniversary production of the show makes a strong argument for its place in the canon of great American plays.

At its core, The Brothers Size is a fraternal duet, one replete with familial harmony and discord in equal measure. At the play’s start the titular siblings Ogun and Oshoozi find themselves reunited, the younger recently released from prison. The elder Ogun, the more responsible and serious of the two, has recently opened his own car mechanic shop. Soon after Oshoosi returns, Ogun rouses him from a sleepy, dreamy state and insists he help at the shop, threatening to tell his parole officer he’s refusing work if he doesn’t comply. Knowing he’s got no choice, Oshoozi takes his sweet time while Ogun honks his truck’s horn to hurry him along, spraying himself with cologne because “If I am going to work I’ma smell G double O D Good.”

Unlike the cologne, the work doesn’t stick: Oshoozi is constantly distracted by the cool, charismatic Elegba. Having spent time in the pen with Oshoozi, Elegba considers him to be a spiritual brother, if not one by blood: “You like my brother man…I ain’t scared to brag on you. Ain’t embarrassed by my brother.” Ogun, however, doesn’t embrace this theoretical third Size brother, seeing him as a bad influence and a distraction from the path his younger brother needs to stay on for their family of two to remain together, a dream that will soon be greatly challenged.

The cast of three is uniformly strong, abetted by a dialogue-less fourth performer, musician Munir Zakee, who sits with the audience, crafting a vivid and often surprising soundscape with an impressive array of percussion instruments. Malcolm Mays effectively haunts the play with his spirit-like Elegba, a character both confident and needy; Alani iLongwe is deeply moving as the rebellious and vulnerable Oshoosi, a young man desperate to be given a second shot at life after incarceration; and André Holland, who played Elegba when the play was produced at the Public Theater in 2009, has now graduated to Ogun and has done so with impressive heart and gravitas, able to stun a gasping audience into silence in the play’s final moments.

Directors McCraney and Sheibani, along with choreographer Juel D. Lane, stage this energetic, highly physical production in the round, using The Shed’s flexible seating to full advantage, with the audience surrounding the actors from all sides to create a truly communal feel. The minimal scenery is a circle of salt (or sand, or both) that the actors make, then come in and out of to denote their presence in any given scene, a not-so-Caucasian Chalk Circle, if you will. It’s a fitting comparison, for, like Brecht’s great play, The Brothers Size is, at its heart, a fable about the role of family amidst great societal injustice.

Is the play perfect? Nope. No play is. Like many an early-career work, dream sequences are employed to develop character and further narrative, and this script has two such lengthy scenes. McCraney’s fondness for ritualistic repetition doesn’t always speed things along either, and some audiences might find the voiced stage directions (e.g., “Elegba enters,” “Ogun goes under the car,” “Ogun enters covered in oil!”) a bit alienating.

But oh, how the beauty of McCraney’s language rises to the rafters, demanding — and earning — forgiveness for the play’s slight blights. One unforgettable moment arrives when Elegba tells Ogun about the night his brother started wailing for him in jail:

Calling for his brother. Crying for his brother.

Can’t do nothing but grieve for a man who miss his brother like that

Sound like a bear trapped, sanging

Can’t mock no man in that much earthly pain. He make us all miss our brothers,

The ones we ain’t neva even have

With gorgeous dialogue like that, it’s little wonder that McCraney has been called the heir apparent to August Wilson. That’s an honor he continues to rightly earn, and lucky are we who get to witness his work in all its stages.