Tarell Alvin McCraney wrote the first draft of The Brothers Size in 2003, with its first performances taking place in 2005 – 06 when he was in graduate school. In the 20 years since, the play has become a classic, a timeless and timely modern-day fable. In the weeks leading up to rehearsals for this production, McCraney discussed the play’s origins, the affinity he finds as a director for tailors and musicians, and the essential role theater plays in our social contracts.

Has your relationship to the play and its world changed since you wrote it?

The story is based on a Yoruba tale that I heard when I was younger. It’s about the ways in which siblings exist in the world, and how we have to let go of who we are in order to be a better sibling. In that sense it has an enduring quality.

When we talk about the geopolitical side of the play and the plight of folks who were formerly incarcerated, the world has not changed dramatically. When I wrote the play, the United States had the highest level of incarceration of any “developed” country in the world, and that’s still the case today.

We’ve created a system that is supposed to be about rehabilitation and justice but we miss the mark. We are often failing the folks who come out of that system. Sometimes as siblings or family members, we do as much as we can but still come up short. There are so many folks who sit in our audiences across races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic statuses who can talk about the prison system, the ways we need to reform it, and how it impacts families. That was the genesis of the play and its importance now.

How does your relationship to a play change when you move from writing to directing it?

Luckily for us, my co-director Bijan Sheibani has worked on this play for a number of years. When he was recently directing it at Geffen Playhouse, he wanted to awaken my initial instincts around the play but also what the play itself wants and needs. The play pushes us to move out of its way. That idea resonated with me. It was wonderful to be back in the rehearsal room after so long with someone as cleareyed as Bijan.

Bijan and the actors know that with this play I feel more like a tailor than I do a playwright. I’m making sure that the outfits the actors are bringing to the play fit, that they ride the contours of their bodies in the roles they’re performing.

It can also feel like working with a piece of music. When you’ve got performers who are like great jazz artists, as we do with André [Holland], Alani [iLongwe], and Malcolm [Mays], you have to make sure that whatever they’re doing in their solos, you’ve got enough eight counts to back them up.

And these are all actors you’ve worked with before.

These actors possess a generosity of spirit. Throughout my career I have found myself blessed to work with actors who have the kind of ability that these actors do. I’ve worked with Alani and André for at least 20 years, in various workshops and readings. André was originally in the play as Elegba 20 years ago. Coming back to the play now as Ogun will allow him to bring out so many of its colors.

Elegba is described as a spirit-like character. For actors, is there something “spirit-like” in taking on different roles in the same story?

You’d have to ask the actors. I stopped acting a long time ago but when I did, I tended to like roles where you knew everything you needed to up front. Instead of Hamlet, I gravitated toward Horatio because we know what he wants from the top to the bottom of the play. With the characters in my play, while they do have a trajectory, they all have the ability to change, and that’s what’s exciting. But in truth I think we build lives around consistency and order.

Yet, for folks like Oshoosi Size, they need a catalyst to shake them up. How do they engage the chaos that lives all around us without breaking the law, or being seen as breaking the law? If change scares us, how does a person who is already deemed “illegal” in some way engage with that change without looking scary? Where are the places that Black men can relax in public? Throughout the play Oshoosi keeps saying he just wants to chill out, but that can be criminalized so easily.

The use of stage directions as voiced dialogue in this play heightens the poetic quality of the text. Is the play speaking directly for itself in a way?

The play has a propulsiveness and a tempo or rhythm. It can get slowed down if we’re trying to figure out what color Ogun’s shop is, for example. This play didn’t ask for that kind of set design. This play has to live within the bodies that perform it. That’s how the play came to me, and so it must come out of these actors. They need every tool they can have in order to move the play, to make the color of night or sunset for us with nothing but a word. The actors share this act of play with us at every moment.

The play is described as taking place in the “distant present.” That phrase evokes a cyclical notion of time…

The act of telling or retelling a story is a kind of sankofa. If you’re telling it, that means it has already happened. Yet by telling it in front of an audience right now, it’s also happening.

In The Brothers Size, this temporality of repeating stories speaks to the nature of recidivism in our country and the cycle of trying for freedom. This kind of story grounds us in a very specific context but also takes place on a cosmic level. It’s in the present, but there’s something ancient about it.

There is also a futuring that’s happening on stage. By doing an action in front of you, by saying, “Tarell puts his hand on the desk,” and then by doing it, I’ve actually called that event into space. A divining happens in front of us that we sometimes take for granted. The actors on stage are imagining something with us together.

To me, that is the fabric of our society. We agree to believe in certain things together. And if together we want society to be better, we have to investigate what we say is true about us. Is it true that we have to live in a society with the most incarcerated folks per capita? Is that what we value? Because the moment we all believe differently, the world will change.