Stage: The Africa Express

Culture
27 May 08

It was the play that took dramatist Tarell McCraney from obscurity to Broadway acclaim - a progression that was all the more impressive considering its minuscule budget.

Now The Brothers Size, which draws parallels between African mythology and contemporary black America, is coming to Ireland.

Every college-based student should take inspiration from the tale of Tarell McCraney. Look at it this way. When McCraney was at Yale University as a student of drama, he and director Tea Alagic were given an assignment to produce a play. With a budget of only $200, they mounted McCraney’s own drama, The Brothers Size, a work that has gone on to become a serious international success.

Currently running at the Peacock Theatre, the play is set in Louisiana, with a plot loosely based on West African mythology. But there is more to it than that. Much more. For one thing, like African-American music forms spreading all the way from jazz through do-wop to hip hop and rap, McCraney wanted to create a play that not only came from, but could physically be staged on, a street corner. No wonder The New York Times said of The Brothers Size that audiences can hear “the thrilling sound that is one of the main reasons we go to theatre, that beautiful music of a new voice.”
While critical acclaim is always welcome, McCraney is more interested in talking about the play itself and its peculiar and intriguing evolution.
“The budget was so small I did make sure the play could be performed on a corner, in a park, wherever, because I wanted to do theatre like that,” he proffers. “As for the theme, it was left to my discretion. Too often I feel theatre is about kings, queens, and people from Russia! I think that sometimes we miss the whole culture of people who tell stories – so I read mythology about the Yorba tradition, which is a West Africa cosmology. But I also wanted to make sure we talk about people we often forget about, which is African-American people in the Southern states. Also, the co-relations between the West African cosmology and the African-American cosmology were too fascinating to give up.”
Tarell embodies these twin ‘cosmologies’ in the play’s two main characters, the brothers Ogun and Oshoosi. Ogun runs an auto repair shop; his brother is an aimless tearaway, just back from a spell in prison. Returning home Oshoosi finds himself hectored by his brother as a ne’er do well.
In essence, however, the play is about the bond between brothers.
“The fact that one of these characters is a parolee is there to show how the penitentiary system can be a strain on the bond of brotherhood,” he explains. “In fact what the play is truly about, at the end of the day, is not parolees, though that is a portion of it, but all the various strains to the bond of brotherhood. And how brotherhood is still more powerful than all of that, how brotherhood is stronger than oppression and years and years of segregation and being put upon by the law and being separated by jail and death and poverty and hunger.
“The brothers are still so similar, even though communication between the two has been almost totally destroyed. Brotherhood still maintains the deepest links between two men. And we don’t often see reflections of African-American, or black men loving and caring for each other. So, in The Brothers Size, what I really try to do, fundamentally, is to paint a portrait of that.”
Lest we be in any doubt, Tarell adds that in this play the concept of Brotherhood is not “the street thing of ‘Yo Bro!’”
“No, in The Brothers Size I am talking about flesh and blood brothers!”