Remember this: against all that destruction
Some yet remained among us unforgetful of origins,
Dreaming secret dreams, seeing secret visions,
Hearing secret voices of our purpose.
—Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons
1.
Growing up in the housing projects of Liberty City, the poorest and most dangerous neighborhood in Miami-Dade County, the teenaged Tarell Alvin McCraney frequently stumbled upon practitioners of Santería and Voudoun. These priests showered him with praise: “You are touched and blessed,” they would say, or “You are a child of Yemayá.” He had no idea what they were talking about. “What did I know? I grew up a Baptist,” McCraney says. The Yemayá reference might have been a comment on his preference for wearing blue and white, the colors most associated with this Yoruban divinity. “I just thought they were my favorite colors,” McCraney shrugs, with a sweet laugh.
The santeros of Miami, intercessors of the divinities, were also quick to let McCraney know: “The gods are talking to you.”
“They kept saying these things to me,” the playwright recalls. “I didn’t say, ‘No, that’s impossible.’ I said, ‘Thank you for telling me.’ Even then I understood that there are things I don’t necessarily know fully—things that are always there resonating in some way, shape or form.” McCraney left the doors of his heart and his mind open.
What does it mean to be a child of Yemayá? This deity of the Ogun River, the largest waterway in the territory of the ancient Yoruba people, reigned over the seas and lakes of what is today Nigeria. When the Africans of the Ifá religion were enslaved and forced to migrate to the New World, this Great Mother evolved to become the protector of the ocean during the Middle Passage. Mighty and unfathomable, she is also noble, gentle and nurturing, unlike Okolun, who rules the ocean’s dark and turbulent depths. The Yorubas worshiped hundreds of gods, many restricted to specific villages. Transplanted to the Americas (especially in Cuba, Brazil and the Caribbean, where the Lukumi people of Nigeria had no choice but to disguise their indigenous beliefs), those Ifá divinities, or orishas, were preserved beneath the mask of Roman Catholic saints. Many of Yemayá’s orisha children, however, did not survive the Middle Passage or were left behind in Yoruba land.
Among the most powerful orishas who did manage to make it into the New World were Ogun (the spirit of iron, war and labor), Oshoosi (the spirit of the forest, the hunter, the wanderer), Oya (or Oba, goddess of the winds), Elegba (the divine messenger, the trickster, the spirit of chaos, also known as Eleggua) and Shango (the spirit of thunder and lightning). These orishas populate the grown-up McCraney’s perfervid dramatic imagination. His trio of profanely poetic ritual plays, written under the umbrella title of The Brother/Sister Plays, debuted this past summer at the McCarter Theatre Center of Princeton, N.J. Starting this month, they alight anew at the Public Theater in New York City under the direction of Tina Landau and Robert O’Hara. Landau herself plans to direct all three plays for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company later in the season.
The 28-year-old McCraney fesses up to having always been an impressionable sort—a sponge, really. He was raised the eldest of four children in the inner-city projects by a crack-addict mother (she contracted HIV through drug use and died when he was 23) who hailed from Georgia and a father whose family had roots in the Caribbean. At 13, McCraney took in a performance of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, an experience that propelled him to a lifelong love for jazz ballet. (Dance rules his life: In a Facebook update from the U.K, where he is presently staying on an international residency, he says he wishes there were “a ballet class somewhere in Stratford-upon-Avon! Nothing relieves stress and heartache like a petite allegro that one can’t follow.”) Working early on with Miami theatre artist Teo Castellanos also changed his life. The young, pliable McCraney wrote his own monologues and performed them, along with an improv troupe of teenagers, at youth rehabilitation and detention centers. McCraney says, “I began to write from myself as a source for people who would understand me instantly.”
His grandfather was a Baptist minister, and though his personal route to what he calls an “all-encompassing God” came via the Judeo-Christian tradition, he also couldn’t help but develop an eye for Yoruba forms. Everywhere he kept recognizing the affinities and correspondences of those archetypes in contemporary society. He began to excavate the stories from Yoruba cosmology. The first time he spotted Yemayá, for instance, was “not on an urn from West Africa—it was in a painting of the Virgin Mary in the middle of Miami, and she was black.” He was surprised to learn that this syncretic image of the Holy Mother is one variant of Yemayá in the New World. “They are actually one and the same,” he says. “The merging created something new that is neither West African nor European.”
In conversation, McCraney and I have a mild disagreement about how the West African myths operate in his Brother/Sister Plays. He seems to want to contradict the numerous interviews he’s given in the past, which underscore the West African influences that lend form and meaning to them. (Perplexed, I wonder if I am talking to a trickster!) McCraney argues that, although the beliefs were originally derived from Africa, one cannot deny the development of a specifically American strain of orisha worship. He cites the way African Americans practice church, the rhythms and syncopation of black music, the sampling techniques in hip-hop, as clear examples of the retentions of Yoruba that still dominate African-American culture. “The hard part is to keep people from talking about the West African cosmology of my plays,” he says. “Yes, you can trace the myths to Africa, but that’s not how I learned them. The orisha stories I learned are American myths, not West African stories.”
McCraney keeps in touch on an occasional basis with the Puerto Rican man, a high priest in the Lukumi tradition, who first sat him down and introduced him to this spiritual discourse. “His name is Okan, which means ‘heart,’” the playwright says. “He’s older than me. We met at Starbucks in Miami Biscayne. He followed me in. When he sat down in front of me, I said, ‘Are you a santero?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Are you here to tell me about the orisha?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ That’s how things got started.”
Until Okan came along, McCraney had never been personal friends with a real Santería practitioner—and to this day, he has not taken part in ceremonial events such as a divination. But he is fascinated by Yoruba aesthetics, in which the search for form is a major theme. It is therefore not surprising that McCraney, following in the footsteps of other black artists in the U.S., has devoted a good portion of his playwriting life to re-envisioning African-American theatre by reconnecting with, recuperating and creatively modifying the visual and verbal fragments and elements of those orisha retentions. Why Yoruba influences prevail in the African diaspora remains little studied and is beyond the scope of this article. But their presence allows us, perhaps, to think of The Brother/Sister Plays as a joyous re-constituting of the shattered African gourd, the water-filled calabash whose broken pieces and healing contents have scattered all over the world.
“I think these archetypes have a universal appeal, which is why they show up in so many places and why I decided to use them in the work,” McCraney says.
“Now, a few people have said I am misrepresenting the orisha,” he continues in another vein. “I worry about writing something that is untrue. But if I worry about every person not liking what portrait I paint, I would never pick up a brush. For me, the myths are becoming more intertwined and less separate. I am interested in keeping that tradition in the space of the theatre and listening to the discourse it creates.”
What’s extraordinary about The Brother/Sister Plays is precisely that double vision: Its lushly streetwise mélange of homespun stories and ritual modes is completely accessible and shimmeringly theatrical. You do not have to know anything about West African cosmology, Santería or Voudoun for the rough magic of these black Atlantic dramas to touch your soul.
Yemayá must be smiling.
2.
The mythically inflected Brother/Sister Plays mashes up the Ifá stories of the Yoruba people, the harsh realities of life in the projects, the ribald cadences of the American South, and the playwright’s personal memories. All of it is impressively and gracefully bound into what Tina Landau calls “a folk symphony.”
Despite their being advertised as “a trilogy,” the three interconnected Brother/Sister Plays—all set in the “distant present” in San Pere, La., near the bayou—might more aptly be called a triptych. Unlike a serial, McCraney’s overarching narrative is loosely braided, and character development from play to play is not novelistic in its details.
In the McCarter production, nine actors play multiple orisha roles, with several tackling the same characters along the two-evening journey. Only one actor—Marc Damon Johnson, playing the stolid, down-to-earth Ogun Size—stays with a single part in the triptych. Director O’Hara notes: “I think of Ogun as almost like a pivot. He is a barometer of time and age.” By contrast, Marcus, the lone central figure not named after an orisha, is the only character whom McCraney allows to address the audience in several Hamlet-like soliloquies, which director O’Hara matches by pitching his colorful, buoyant production in the mode of Shakespearean pageantry. “The actor who plays the trickster Elegba in Red and Brown and Brothers Size suddenly becomes Marcus,” says O’Hara. “The biggest part in the trilogy is Elegba/Marcus. They have the most lines to speak. Unlike Ogun, he undergoes the most change throughout. Casting-wise, it’s a huge challenge.” Alano Miller, who morphs seamlessly from orisha to human figure, is transfixing to watch.
Because Marcus has little to do with the theme of biological brothers and sisters, sometimes I think the Brother/Sister title reads as a misnomer. Perhaps “cousins” is more precise, McCraney suggests. Nevertheless, the three works grew out of the author’s need to understand his interconnectedness to his own siblings. In the Red and Brown Water, the first work in the sequence, which Landau also fully staged at the Alliance Theatre of Atlanta, “is a conversation with my sister and mother,” says McCraney, who dedicates Brothers Size, the runaway masterpiece of this trio, to his two brothers. The sprawling Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet—presented in the same evening as Brothers Size (both under O’Hara’s direction) but by no means a second act to the other play—concerns how his family members “interact and deal with me…how they knew things about me that I never realized.”
An exegesis on this latter remark: According to the Yorubas, human beings select their Ori, their guardian orisha, in the mother’s womb, but they forget their destiny when they are born. Marcus’s Ori had determined that he was “sweet.” In this play about coming into manhood, Marcus flails and runs around in search of his missing Ori. A powerful wet dream of a “black-black” black man, drenched in a great rain, forces Marcus to sexual awareness. The play’s running joke is that the San Pere community has mostly figured out his gay orientation already. The secret of “the sweet” is that he dreams secret dreams, that he sees secret visions.
So, while In the Red and Brown Water takes on the trappings of a woman’s play and Brothers Size delves into dark corners of black masculinity, Marcus explores gay identity directly—it’s the openly “out” play of the three, if you will. However, McCraney cautions, “Marcus’s story isn’t really my story as far as coming out of the closet. Now, the portion of Marcus where someone tells him about being able to ‘see things others can’t,’ well…that’s more personal.”
Tracking how McCraney’s autobiography relates to the Brother/Sister narratives is a fruitless parlor game. It yields no great dramatic dividends. Because of the author’s self-referential quirks (such as naming a minor character after himself), it leads to a cul-de-sac. It’s more rewarding to glean how these realistic plays rework the orisha metaphysics. Oya, bearing the name of the Yoruban spirit of the storms and tempests, may run like the wind, but she is mainly a passive central figure; accordingly, Landau strips In the Red and Brown Water down to the essentials and interprets Oya’s tragic story as a series of free-flowing choral tableaux. Her terrific ensemble, all in white, enters with buckets and tubs that morph into drums and props—except that Oya spends most of her onstage time aching, restless and stuck on a front porch. In the first act, she stalls and loses her chance to get a track scholarship at a state university because of her terminally ill mother. In the second, Oya becomes torn between two men: the stuttering Ogun, whose love she does not return, and the swaggering stud Shango, who enlists in the army. Doubly unfortunate: Oya can’t bear children. Like the title character of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma, she’s trapped in a culture where fertility and motherhood are prized as a woman’s right and destiny.
In the Red and Brown Water unfolds as a parable about a black girl’s broken dreams and melancholic stasis. Landau says, “Tarell talks about Red and Brown as being the little gawky one. It’s the play most people ‘get’ least, and that he loves the most, because it follows its own awkward, dreamlike rules.”
Dramatically, Brothers Size re-imagines the essences of the orishas: the hardworking Ogun (named after the spirit of iron) who owns a car shop; his wayward brother Oshoosi (the hunter), just released from jail on probation; and Elegba, Oshoosi’s shady former cell mate (the messenger and trickster). It’s a family drama about the ties and Otis Redding tunes that bind. The sexual interloper Elegba worms his way into the two brothers’ strained relationship and sows dissent. Yet he becomes a catalyst for their emotional growth.
First staged by McCraney’s fellow Yalie Tea Alagic as a student project on a $200 budget, Brothers Size has the advantage of being the first play of the triptych out of the gate. Produced by the Foundry Theatre at the Under the Radar festival in New York in 2007, the play also knocked the socks off British audiences in London and Dublin, kick-starting McCraney’s reputation as an edgy and original American talent to watch. Because of its tight construction and sense of unity, it is the most breathtaking of the three plays—the one that adheres to director Peter Brook’s notion of “immediate theatre,” in which actors achieve a urgency of sacred ritual through limited means. (McCraney worked as an actor with Brook and the French playwright Marie-Hélène Etienne on Le Costume in Chicago. Brook wrote the letter of recommendation that got McCraney into Yale, where he later assisted August Wilson on Radio Golf.
These “cousin” plays trumpet the queer complexity of McCraney’s flashy devices: the spinning of vulgar poetic verses that gesture toward a musical idiom, the invasive or prophetic or Jungian or conjuring force of dreams; and the Viola Spolin-inspired storybook way McCraney writes his characters’ stage directions right into the dialogue.
For Landau, the Brother/Sister Plays is a nagging puzzle she hopes finally to crack at Steppenwolf. “Tarell has a stage direction where a character says somebody does so-and-so,” Landau notes, “then the other person sees it and says, ‘How could they not?’ That’s a mystery to me. What does it mean to perform an action that is unavoidable for someone else? There’s a line at the end of Marcus where a character looks to the sky and waits for an answer. That gesture runs through all the plays. I don’t know if I can unlock them completely. I want to look at the way life changes and glows in these plays.”
3.
Like a great rain, the blessings of orishas have descended upon Tarell Alvin McCraney. Even if this weren’t an unusually rich time for black theatre in the U.K. and the U.S., has there even been an American playwright who has been so sensationally celebrated at so awfully young an age on both sides of the pond? Within just two years of graduating from the Yale School of Drama at age 26, a bounty of laurels, grants, residencies and prize monies have landed at his feet. In quick and hurried succession: a Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award (from the Alliance Theatre), a Whiting Writers’ Award ($50,000), a Royal Shakespeare Company/Warwick International Playwrights Residency, London’s Evening Standard Award (for most promising playwright), a special Playwrights of New York jury prize ($5,000 from Lark Play Development Center), a National Endowment for the Arts Outstanding New American Play award ($90,000), and most recently a New York Times outstanding playwright award. Those are just the highlights.
At the same time, one quick Google search brings up results that make him seem like the Second Coming: “one of the most exciting and distinctive young playwrights to have emerged in many years” (Oskar Eustis), “one of the most startling new voices to emerge in the American theatre” (Emily Mann), “actually kind of a miracle” (Mark Russell), “the new Shakespeare” (Afrodiziak.com) and—my favorite—“the sexiest writer in town” (Evening Standard).
This is not to suggest that McCraney is not worth the plaudits. At some point in time, every playwright deserves to be fêted like a king or queen. But when producers go out of their way to create a two-page graphic timeline of every milestone in his otherwise young life and small body of work, one cannot escape feeling the surreal energy in the air. All the buildup generated by the star-making machinery could potentially set up embarrassing expectations for the plays themselves, not to mention for the emerging voice that deserves a realistic chance of being heard in the long run.
“One has to live up to that [hype] every time you come out,” comments Robert O’Hara, who can relate. As the author of Insurrection: Holding History, he made a big splash at the Public in the late 1990s and experienced firsthand the weight of the propaganda of being “George Wolfe’s protégé.” “After a while you just say to yourself: I am actually just my own person. You can’t control what people write about you.”
Perhaps, O’Hara conjectures, the excitement around McCraney is this: “There is a profound joy in having a trilogy about African Americans that is not O’Neill, not Ibsen, not Shakespeare, not August Wilson—but a particularly homegrown African-American voice that you don’t usually see in such expansive form. The audacity of three fully formed plays—not three one-acts, but three complicated and substantial plays by a young writer who grew up in the projects—that’s a great risk and a great joy to me. It feels right.”
Although grateful for the kudos, McCraney insists that the hard sell in his press clips “is not about me.” Coming from a life of hard knocks allows him to recognize that this turn for the better is only recent. “I’ve got a better understanding of what people are—they are always doing the best they can,” he says. “Plus, look, who knows where this will go? I don’t. What I want to do is lay down at night and say, ‘Today, I tried my best.’”
At the present moment, McCraney adds, he would be a lucky guy if he could figure out a way to cease being a transatlantic nomad. “I live wherever I am working,” he laments. “I have some old books in my dad’s house in Miami. The Times and Evening Standard awards—those I gave to my godparents. But it’s not like I have a room there.”
One thing McCraney does to ground himself from the whirlwind of being the flavor of the month, especially when he walks into large theatre institutions, is to utter soothing prayers he learned as a child (“The Lord is my shepherd…”). Those utterances help tame the restless beast when the insidious “imposterphobia” strikes. “It was first explained to me by dean James Bundy at Yale School of Drama,” McCraney says. “He said that we probably all felt like we didn’t know how we arrived at our first year at that prestigious college—how is it that we were supposed to be the future of the American theatre? He said that was a lot of pressure, and that we might feel like imposters. He said that feeling is normal and would go away.”
Tarell can testify that it does not. It is “this creeping sensation I’ve been trying to beat back since my days of living out of a suitcase began,” he muses in an online journal entry. “How does one fortify oneself? How do you sturdy yourself and maintain a course of soul-searching and not glamour-shopping? How do you work to build deeper connections to audiences and not accolades in parchments and press? And how do you do multiple explorations into similar waters simultaneously around the globe?”
Imposterphobia becomes particularly acute, Tarell says, when journalists ask questions about his life or when people ask him “the meaning of existence on the street corner. I always think to myself, ‘When did I study philosophy or theology extensively? Why would anybody be interested in what I have to say in this area?’”
But that fear “goes far, far away when you are working diligently and truthfully on your craft,” he continues. “Because then you are answering those questions in the way you feel most apt—or at least wrestling with them in a way that you know how to set up the experiment and the findings that come out of it. You can draw conclusions about life, the drunkard, the cosmos.”
Collaborating in rehearsals on Brothers Size, McCraney adds, meant constantly reminding himself of the three pieces that inspired him. One was a passage from an Essex Hemphill poem, “When My Brother Fell,” dedicated to the author and gay activist Joseph Beam, who succumbed to AIDS-related illness. It reads in part:
When my Brother fell
I picked up his weapons
And never once questioned
Whether I could carry
The weight and grief,
The responsibility he shouldered.
Since Brothers Size forges the bonds of brotherhood in the kiln of shared struggle, McCraney also remembered the faces of his brothers Jason and Paul.
And then there was the short Yoruba song/poem about Ogun, one of Yemayá’s children, which, roughly translated, says, “Ogun’s brother Oshoosi has gone wandering and Ogun built tools to find him.”
For McCraney, “It is always important to remember the source.” And so he does.
How could he not?
