Play sets tale of bayou free

When it’s good, art introduces us to a world we wouldn’t know apart from our artistic interaction with it. When the interaction touches us, it offers a shared human experience more powerful than any ideology.

Miles Davis managed a stirring achievement with his soundtrack for a movie depicting boxing heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, a black American who lived large at the turn of the century and defeated "the great white hope." Davis’ moving arrangement laid 16 rounds of metaphorical boxing across 16 tracks of music.

Appearing in Istanbul within two weeks of the election of the first black American president, "The Brothers Size" is a play written by emerging American talent Tarell Alvin McCraney, a young black man raised in a tough Miami neighborhood. He wrote the script a year before Hurricane Katrina decimated the story’s setting along the Louisiana Gulf Coast. That it is a fictional place lends an allegorical quality to a haunting tale that pulls us from past to present with the subtle power of a Gulf tide. But the characters secure themselves in a place that despite progress or flooding dwells beneath mainstream consciousness.

Emotions rule the ring
With no political whispers or moral pontificating, the characters’ struggles transcend their all-black bayou setting. But the gravity of their conditions keeps the play grounded: The theme of imprisonment twists around brotherhood the way roots keep swamp Mangroves stunted under the sun.

Ogun is the reliable, hard-working older sibling; Oshoosi is on parole, more fun loving and less apt to take responsibility. Elegba, Oshoosi’s former cellmate, presents a road to temptation in the form of lust, a tricked-out car and drugs. Through rhythmic storytelling and allusions to Nigerian myths most of us didn’t grow up with, the exploration of these three black men lets us in even as the chalk line they draw around themselves at the start is as white as the racially driven woe they still must carry today.

From chain gang to tenderness
The three performances add satirical jabs to a lyrical script that calls for original back beat. The refrain, the unconscious struggle, comes to us in a dreamscape that ranges in choreography and symbol from the chain gang of slavery to the muscular elegance of ritual dance signifying the characters’ African heritage.

The actors hailing from combinations of Nigeria, the West Indies and the UK nail the Louisiana accents. With a script that suffers no rules, stage directions are spoken out loud as a fresh and effective means of communicating with the audience. Making fun of black on black racism, the characters imitate the black sheriff’s poor grasp of the white man’s euphemism for imprisoning black men: He says "rehabituated" instead of "rehabilitated," in a shining, if chrome-like, moment of irony. The sheriff is later quoted misusing an expression popular among these black men when he exclaims, "What the s***?"

The layers of the brothers’ vulnerable and fractious relationship are peeled back in a riveting scene featuring a sublime duel as they sing over Otis Redding’s "Share a Little Tenderness." This climactic scene parses out the intensity of their love for each other even as they admit to growing "weary." The subtext: A man endures on the land of his birth, not free to live alongside his brothers, not free to wander the streets without "gwan somewhere" - and not free of a culture that imprisons one in every five black men.

Daniel Francis’ Ogun, the elder brother, took the air out of the room when he revealed to his free-spirited brother that as his sole caretaker he had not been free to let his brother fall or even to help him along: He had been damned by either attempt. As Oshoosi, Tunji Kasim’s face and gestures belong in one moment to a sprightly youth and in the next a raging elderly man as he struggles in vain to become a man. "You’re trying to lock me up again," he cries out to his brother - neither free to become their own men.

The new Talimhane Tiyatrosu in Taksim presented the final performances of a four-day run of the touring hit play Saturday. Making its European debut last year, "The Brothers Size" is a UK production between the Actors Touring Company and the Young Vic. They partnered with Talimhane twin theater, the Arcola Theatre in London, to bring it to Istanbul. "The Brothers Size" will finish its nine-city tour in Manchester and Birmingham in the next two weeks.


www.atc-online.com