The Brothers Size: family night at the Unicorn

October 28, 2015

Liz Cook,

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Sensitive performances and fraternal sparring stamp the Unicorn Theatre’s The Brothers Size, a drama that masters heavy themes with a light hand.

The play, the first in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister trilogy, follows three young men — each named for a different Yoruban orisha, or divinity — in the Louisiana bayou as they confront the binds of family and incarceration. The action begins in earnest with the release from prison of Oshoosi Size (Donovan Woods) and Elegba (Teddy Trice). The cellmates had been locked up for two years.

Elder brother Ogun Size (Damron Russel Armstrong) rides Oshoosi hard, unimpressed by his brother’s idleness and relentless pleasure-seeking. Oshoosi, in turn, rags on Ogun for his grim-faced demeanor. “I’m the one who should be walking around like a stone,” he complains. “You act like you in jail.”

When Elegba offers Oshoosi a taste of real freedom — a car — competition for Oshoosi’s affections begins, with Elegba and Ogun representing the closeness of connections forged by, respectively, battle and blood.

Director Mykel Hill has staged the play in the round, making the closeness physical as well as emotional. On the Unicorn’s petite Jerome Stage, every chance look or sly smile feels significant. Scene changes are underscored by textured drumming, as the actors stomp, hum, strike wrenches together like chimes or beat on their own bodies.

As Ogun, Armstrong is iron personified: His crisp hiss and cold fury keep Oshoosi at a protective distance. As Elegba, Trice is every bit the trickster, mastering the good-natured purr of a friend whose gifts always come at a price.

But the show’s undeniable highlight is Woods, whose performance as Oshoosi seems driven by a heart three sizes too big for his frame. Woods bounds around the stage with acrobatic energy and precision and bewitches us with the cadence of a natural storyteller. McCraney’s play isn’t short on monologues, but Woods’ vivid readings make even past events feel immediate and tense.

He also shows us Oshoosi’s real love for Ogun. In one of the play’s most chilling sequences, he screams for his big brother silently, his face a mask of grief and animal longing.

The connection among the three is authentic enough to make some of this play’s self-referential elements feel jarring. McCraney’s script demands that actors read their stage directions aloud, from announcing entrances and exits to prefacing their speeches with such tags as “realizing” or “breathing hard” that they could just as easily, you know, act. Though the move inspires the occasional groan — we get it: Art is artifice, and grad school is real — the words are also strangely poignant, often startling the brothers with the reactions that the text demands.

It’s a sensible choice for a script in which plot takes a backseat to the intricacies of speech. The Brothers Size is ultimately about how things are said or unsaid.

The design elements keep that focus intact. Jamie Lindemann’s set is evocative and spare, fusing functional wooden crates with variegated metal panels. The crates are easily joined to suggest larger set pieces, benches and beds. But the ingenuity is in their metal sides. A corrugated section resembles a highway guard rail but trembles like a thunder sheet when struck. A perforated section looks like a cage and scrapes like a guiro. The set offers actors a playground for rhythm and imagination.

Shannon Smith-Regnier’s costumes are another delight, connecting characters with both their orisha counterparts (Elegba broadcasts in his requisite red and black for much of the play) and the drearier realities of the bayou. Which means: grease-stained coveralls for Ogun, baggy jorts and Timberlands for Oshoosi. Alex Perry’s lights and gobos blanket the stage in chubby lines, simultaneously evoking West African art and the long shadows of prison bars.

It bears mentioning that The Brothers Size, a play about family, is not a family play. At intermission, I overheard a couple of audience members balk at the preponderance of four-letter barbs and racial slurs. I’ll cop to not noticing, or much caring, about the language: The brothers sling profanity with near tenderness, making the words feel less like curses than like fraternal ribbing.

That’s the trick of McCraney’s play. Struggles are endured with disarming gentleness, and ugliness is masked with song. Throughout, the brothers confront big specters and grinding social ills: the “criminal until proven docile” treatment of black men, the spiritual loneliness of incarceration, the challenges of life after parole. But for all its real-world aches and pains, The Brothers Size ends with a balm. Haunted by impending loss — and sparked by the bittersweet joy that precedes it — the Sizes belt Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” drumming and dancing without inhibition in a duet of love and levity. The scene is electric, the song as close as we come to a thesis in a play about those who tread lightly in a violent world.

McCraney and the Unicorn have rejected the tidy corners of the well-made play for something freer. The Brothers Size has its own rhythm, to which it isn’t hard to dance.