Review: THE BROTHERS SIZE at Geffen Playhouse

One could say that the Tarell Alvin McCraney era at The Geffen Playhouse kicks off where McCraney himself began – with THE BROTHERS SIZE, part of the Brothers/Sisters trilogy that the playwright wrote while a student at Yale. Two decades later, a 20th anniversary staging of THE BROTHERS SIZE draws the curtain on the 2024-25 season at the Geffen, the first programed by McCraney since he took over the leadership of the Geffen in the fall of 2023.

SIZE, a heart-rending, music-suffused three-hander exploring the strength and limits of fraternal bonds, is being staged in the Geffen’s smaller Audrey Skirball Kenis Theatre, where it fits beautifully. Not having seen the long-running production at The Fountain Theatre in 2014 in the work’s LA premiere, I can’t speak to the play's power 10 years ago, but the Geffen’s staging is impactful, a beautiful and tough experience. 

Director Bijan Sheibani and scenic designer Suzu Sakai have configured the seating area in the round, to allow us to surround the action. Directly upstage at the top of the circle sits the production's sound designer and composer Stan Mathabane who welcomes us in and scores the journey with the aid of about a dozen musical instruments.

As the play opens via a musical invocation, Ogun Size (played by Sheaun McKinney) - the toiler - begins work in his driveway. He is joined by Elegba (Malcom Mays) – the destructive interloper – who laps the stage distributing a circle of sand as he sings, “The road is rough and hard.”  Ogun’s younger brother, Oshoosi Size (Alani iLongwe), the dreamer – is at the center of the circle, simultaneously safe and trapped.

And that’s our parcel of earth and our inhabitants. Other than that sand ring, this stage is bare, and it is left to McKinney, Mays, iLongwe along with Mathabane to establish and color this hardscrabble universe and dreamscape. The setting is someplace near the Bayou, present day. The garage operated by Ogun sits somewhere a few miles away from Ogun’s home. Oshoosi dreams of seeing Madagascar or Mexico, and somewhere out there is the prison where Oshoosi and Elegba served time together. When Oshoosi was incarcerated, his brother could not reach him physically or spiritually. Now Oshoosi is “free,” but he is imprisoned in a different capacity. By Ogun.

Ogun wants his brother to work, to wake up and make good, and he briefly employs him at his garage. Oshoosi wants what he has missed or never had – women, a car – and freedom from Ogun, whom he also loves. Elegba has a car and possibly the means to some easy money. Their bond established in prison and the love the two men have shared makes them – in Elegba’s eyes – also brothers.

Both awake and in dreams, Elegba and Oshoosi sing, making aching beautiful harmonies, to connect and to express longing. We’re told Ogun has no voice, but in fact he does, and he can. When they were children, and newly orphaned, Ogun would his brother to sleep.

The push-pull tension between the Size siblings is continually on the verge of boiling over, with Oshoosi threatening to leave his brother’s house, but never being able to do so. When Ogun doesn’t wake Oshoosi up, giving his brother the independence to sleep, Oshoosi walks the miles to the garage. His accusation when he arrives: “You left me!” That’s an action which, when you are your brother’s keeper, you do not take. Matters will reach a tipping point as the battle over Oshoosi’s fate intensifies.

Director Sheibani, who has previously staged SIZE in London, deftly navigates the play’s tonal shifts between anger, longing and harmony, along with all that music. He is greatly aided by a workman-like cast. McKinney – rocklike, yet boiling over with regret and self-doubt as the brother known as “Size 1.” When Ogun recounts the loss of an old flame, and the shocking outcome, McKinney’s face shows us every inch of how he still feels the loss. Here is a man who throws every fiber of his being into two things: physical labor and protection of his brother.

iLongwe’s Oshoosi is the play’s electricity, a man who does everything – sleeps, dreams, dances, breaks apart – with a wounded beauty. Mays’s seductive Elegba partners him exquisitely. The actor has enough hustling charm to make him enticing and dangerous. You get why Oshoosi would follow this man, and also how Ogun can’t easily get him away from Oshoosi. We see what Elegba does in the context of THE BROTHERS SIZE, but don’t know what led him down this road.

The impacts of incarceration weigh heavily over all three characters, and kudos to McCraney and the Geffen for using this production to launch the company’s Theater as a Lens for Justice initiative designed to open up the theater for populations who have been affected by incarceration.

As Oshoosi Size learns, breaking free is no easy accomplishment, but it certainly helps to have a brother in your corner.  

THE BROTHERS SIZE plays through September 8 at 10886 Le Conte Avenue, Westwood. 

Photo of Sheaun McKinney and Alani iLongwe by Jeff Lorch

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