Some aspects of reality are particularly difficult to express — especially parts of one’s experience that reflect back to the dominant culture things it is determined to deny or justify or dismiss. For any Black man, for anyone whose life has been touched by the carceral system, life may be full of such realities — of heartbreak, of erasure, and also of inexplicable resilience and of human connections whose power would not be understood by everyone. One might attempt to speak of such experiences, but one might well struggle to find words that satisfy. 

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney lives in this dilemma: He writes from the vantage point of a Black queer man, and his journey has been impacted by a brother’s experience of incarceration. If you’ve seen his other work, which includes the film Moonlight, which he co-wrote and for which he won an Academy Award, and the play Choir Boy, which Portland Center Stage, under Chip Miller’s direction, brought us two years ago, you know that McCraney is prone to pushing the bounds of conventional storytelling. The stories he wants to tell pull us beyond what we think we know, including about how to tell a story.

The Brothers Size, now on at Portland Center Stage under Miller’s direction, is more challenging to access than those other works; arguably, it aims to evoke realities even more complex. McCraney’s approach with this play is poetical, making use of mystical characters from the Yoruba traditions of West Africa. There isn’t much in the way of plot; the three cast members embody this story more than telling it, and often speak their own stage directions in the same poetic cadence as their lines of dialogue. 

Sometimes they address each other as though addressing a spirit rather than a person — and their location often evokes a mystical encounter more than a literal one. Though there is a story at the heart of the play, we aren’t meant to see it as an account of literal events.  It’s true in other ways.

The three central characters are named for three Yoruba deities — Ogun, Oshoosi, and Elegba. Yoruba influences infuse the play with the West African spiritual heritage that animates the culture of its descendants in the Americas. There’s a sort of reverence here that those outside that culture might miss; a tapping into ancient knowing. We are invited to tune in.

Ogun and Oshoosi are brothers in the play, and Oshoosi and Elegba share a bond forged in their experience of incarceration. Ogun Size is the older of the two brothers and, named for the god of iron, he is the more stable, conventional, and determined. As embodied by Austin Michael Young in his Portland Center Stage debut, Ogun’s movement is focused on production, on staying within the lines of expectation. His head is down, he is working under a car, he is constructing and holding up a roof over the brothers’ heads. Diligence is his power.

Ogun is often at a loss for how to reach his younger brother Oshoosi, named for the deity connected with hunting and survival. As embodied by Charles Grant, a versatile performer beloved by Portland audiences, Oshoosi is hungry, not so much for food as for expression. He doesn’t want to think about (and doesn’t want Ogun to focus on) the two years he spent inside a prison and the many expectations that still shackle him on release, including the requirement to work when work of any kind is now that much harder to get. Where Ogun would likely just put his head down, Oshoosi reaches for more freedom of movement. He needs space and freedom to express.  He wants to sing.

Sponsor

Elegba enters this mix of love and misunderstanding and shakes things up further. Ogun experiences Elegba’s appearances as intrusions, but to Oshoosi, Elegba is a compelling diversion, perhaps a reminder of the life force that kept him alive during their time in prison. Their connection sometimes feels dangerous, but also easier than the connection between the brothers. They share a knowing born of suffering and resistance. 

In Yoruba, Elegba is a deity connected to crossroads and, as played powerfully by Gerrin Delane Mitchell, who is also a versatile presence in many Portland productions, Elegba injects smoldering energy into the action whenever he appears, in person or in Oshoosi’s dreams.

The three encounter one another in various combinations of connection, desire, trust, and distrust. The meaning of these encounters isn’t necessarily made fully explicit; the three communicate through movement as much as words (director Chip Miller also choreographed the production), and they move through a particularly compelling space that pulls us away from the literal. 

Brittany Vasta’s especially evocative scenic design features two sloping walkways constructed amidst towers of discarded items — car doors, a shopping cart, a bed frame, remnants of a chain-link fence — depriving us and the men of the reassurance of order that grounds the lives of those for whom the culture makes a space to thrive, and who are expected to succeed. These men are expected to prove themselves in a context of disassembly that forgives neither mistakes nor confusion nor the distractions of desire.

The experience of watching this play reminded me of other times when I have felt like I am overhearing and witnessing a conversation that I’m not fully equipped to understand. The production enlisted the cultural expertise of Carlos-Zenon Trujillo, who is steeped in the religious traditions depicted here, and one has the sense that those with more grounding in those traditions or simply in the experience of being a Black man and of being impacted by the carceral system may well understand or at least resonate with aspects of the action that the rest of us might not perceive. 

To the extent that that creates disorientation, I would tend to view that as a gifted disorientation, a worthy contrast to the disorientation imposed on the dispossessed by an unforgiving dominant culture that insists on denying their value in ways never named and never reckoned with. This challenging but rich play, offered up by dedicated artists, affords an opportunity to absorb what we may not fully understand, stirring empathy and connecting us with deeper knowing. 

The Brothers Size

• Company: Portland Center Stage
• Where: Main Stage, The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Ave., Portland
• When: Wednesdays-Sundays through May 18; dates and times here
• Ticket information: Here

Sponsor