The best art can both 1) show you fictionalized things you’ve never seen before, and 2) make you feel like you’re watching a piece of yourself on the stage/page/screen.

Walking out of the opening night of Portland Center Stage’s “The Brothers Size,” I felt both. The show was one of the most electrifying, heartrending, original, and moving things I have ever experienced.

I’m still reeling, and I don’t think I can adequately convey everything I just experienced in words.

But I’m a writer, so I’m going to try.

The story itself is straightforward: it’s about two brothers. Ogun Size (played by Austin Michael Young in this PCS production) and Oshoosi Size (Charles Grant) are living together. More accurately, Oshoosi is crashing at his older brother’s house while he tries to get his life back on track a few months after getting out of prison. Underneath the brothers’ classic sibling bickering is deep-seated hurt from the two years they spent separated by bars. Complicating, well, everything, is Elegba (Gerrin Delane Mitchell), whose time in prison overlapped with Oshoosi’s and is now there for him as someone who can relate to his lived experience in a way his brother can’t. The triangle tension between the three is so simple and yet drives the entire show, plowing into some of life’s most difficult questions:

• What does it mean to love someone — does it mean pushing them to be their best or giving them space to find their own path?
• Do you put your trust in the people who’ve known you the longest or the people who’ve been through the worst with you?
• How do we define what it means to be free when we’re all confined within systems and limitations outside our control?

From everything I’ve said so far, it probably sounds like a grim, gritty play — but “The Brothers Size” doesn’t fit in that box. It was also funny, and visual, and musical, and experimental. For example, throughout the show, the characters break the fourth wall to announce stage directions before they perform them, so you hear it verbalized before you see it happen. Dream sequences of Yoruba cosmology featured neon-lit garb surpassing Coachella standards (credit to Dominique Fawn Hill, costume designer), which brought a fantastical edge that managed to fit naturally within the story. The stage was layered with levels of platforms that built dimension and real distance for the characters to scale (credit to Brittany Vasta, scenic designer.)

All of this added up to a show more than the sum of its parts. I often find myself writing something along the lines of “in less capable hands, this could have been a huge miss,” when I’m talking about shows doing something risky. That is true for this show on eighteen gazillion levels. There were so many pieces to this, and any one of them, had it been just a little off-kilter, could have ruined the whole thing. Instead, like a sixteen-step recipe in the hands of a Michelin-starred chef, it was a masterpiece.

And that simile isn’t even really a simile, because writer Tarell Alvin McCraney is the screen-and-stagewriting equivalent of a Michelin-starred chef, when you consider he wrote “Moonlight.” That’s right, HE WROTE “MOONLIGHT”!!!!

And just as “Moonlight” was semi-autobiographical, “The Brothers Size” pulls from McCraney’s lived experience: his brother went to jail and, in McCraney’s words, came out “completely changed, and there was no way to help him. I didn’t have the tools, the resources, the access – and still don’t – to make his life better.”

That explains why the heart of this story runs so deep, and why it works so well. It’s fiction, and it’s not. And knowing that Ogun’s anguish, his complete helplessness watching his brother suffer, is based on McCraney’s lived experience makes it that much more powerful.

Having had a stellar rewatching experience at PCS’s “Twelfth Night,” I just bought a ticket to see “The Brothers Size” again. I had to. And this time it’s a perfect bookend: the opening night and the final performance. Only instead of grouping both shows in one post, I’m going to share these reflections now and then come back with my thoughts after seeing it the second time.

I’m curious how it will be different: for me, when I know what to expect; and for the actors, who will have performed it 25 times between now and then. While they’re doing all those matinee and evening performances, I’ll go to the ballet, get a tattoo, visit another state, take my cat in for dental surgery, see Chris Grace as Scarlett Johansson, and host a dinner party. Then we’ll meet back at the stage for one more evening together.

See you in 23 days!