Bulging with sexual tension, Jubilee’s ‘Brothers Size’ has mythic dimensions
TRUE BLACK | Oshoosi (Seun Soyemi), Elegba (Adam A. Anderson) and Ogun (Rico Romalus Parker) forge a tense brotherhood in Jubilee’s regional premiere of the sultry, provocative play ‘The Brothers Size’ by MacArthur Genius fellow Tarell Alvin McCraney. (Photo courtesy Buddy Myers)
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com
Ogun Size (Rico Romalus Parker) is almost the stereotype of the angry black man: He’s a business owner — the best auto mechanic in the neighborhood — for which he’s had to work his ass off his whole life. He stayed out of trouble, but it has left him humorless and focused.
The same can’t be said of his baby brother Oshoosi (Seun Soyemi), who spent a bullet in the pen. While inside, Oshoosi met Elegba (Adam A. Anderson), whom he continues to hang with now that both are out on parole. Ogun thinks Elegba is a bad influence, but there’s only so much a brother can do.
The catalog stories pitting brother against brother dates as far back as Cain and Abel, but in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size — which closes this weekend as the season-opening production of Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre — the concept of brotherly love takes on unique and epic dimensions while remaining incredibly intimate. What seems like it might be a formulaic riff on the African-American experience, or the conflict between testosterone-fueled battles for supremacy, develops into a touching rumination on masculinity, identity and the difficulties of being a man today.
The brilliance not only of the play, which races through 75 breathless minutes, but of this staging by Tre Garrett, is how all the diverse elements come together. There’s a mythic element that doesn’t lend itself to easy interpretation; it has biblical references without be programmatic; it addresses the symbols of American slavery and the post-Jim Crow era without drawing bright lines for the audience.
Opening with a drum-beat and African dance, the three men — all muscular and shirtless, imbuing a definite homoeroticism (which emerges throughout the play in flashes) — set off the parameters of the stage with a chain that seems to confine them whatever they do. But rather than seeming heavy-handed, much of these images linger as background — the prism through which the characters experience the tiny indignities and injustices that shape who they are.
With Parker’s brutish intensity, you might peg Ogun as an inarticulate bully, but the truth is exactly the opposite. He’s a soulful and articulate character who struggles to convey his understanding of the world to his more naive brother. Soyemi and Anderson are equally impassioned.
The Brothers Size, the first show in Jubilee’s 34th season, is the first installment in a trilogy by MacArthur Genius grant winner McCraney, and Jubilee is committed to premiering the next two. That’s a reason to be jubilant.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 24, 2014.
