Theater

The Brothers Size, Part 3

Retrospectives, Theater

There was solemnity hanging in the air of the Armory as I walked down the orchestra steps.

Live theater is, by definition, ephemeral. But there’s something about seeing a production’s final performance that heightens that feeling, knowing it’s the last time these actors will speak or sing these words together, possibly the last time they’ll ever gather together in person.

For this show in particular, the sense of finality felt personal. I’ve spent the past month immersed in “The Brothers Size” and its distant-present Louisiana auto shop, as detailed in Parts 1 and 2. Today felt like a goodbye.

Before I get into the final show, let me fill you in on the past week. A few days ago, I had the absolute privilege to sit down and debrief with the show’s dramaturg, Kamilah Bush. It was supposed to be a class discussion, but I was the only student who came, so I basically got to gush all my thoughts and theories and favorite parts of the show and then have Kamilah explain what the production team’s intention was in designing every aspect.

It was a theater/literature nerd’s actual dream. I walked away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of every element of the show and how they fit together. (Unfortunately, this experience has also spoiled me. What do you mean, now I have to go back to seeing shows and not being able to debrief with the creative team??)

The other final gift was the script. Enrolling in the community college course granted me access to the full text of the play. In true college student fashion, I waited until the night before the closing show to read it. Between midnight and two a.m., fueled by pizza and root beer, I consumed and annotated the entire thing, peppering it with notes and observations from my previous viewings and my discussion with Kamilah. I picked up on so many things I hadn’t noticed or could connect to other elements. It was a perfect exercise to prepare for the final show.

That brings us to this afternoon, when I walked down the orchestra steps feeling a strange mix of excitement and sadness to be at the beginning of the end. I took my seat in the front row, far left, my very favorite place in the theater. (The rare instances I can’t see something onstage are frustrating, but worth it to be so close to the actors I can see every twitch of their mouth, glint in their eye, drop of sweat on their brow. The show is so much more palpable up close.)

Featuring Austin Michael Young and Charles Grant. Photos by Jingzi Zhao. Courtesy of Portland Center Stage.

I reviewed the show in Part 1, so I won’t repeat all the praise I lavished on opening night, other than to say it all held true as the production came to a close. This was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. (As a former theater beat reporter, I’ve seen a lot of shows.) Austin Michael Young, Charles Grant and Gerrin Delane Mitchell, with the support of the full PCS team, brought Tarell Alvin McCraney’s story to the stage with such care and skill, it was impossible NOT to be completely immersed in the world they built.

Which is why, when the lights came up and final bows were bowed, I left the theater in a haze. It was difficult to accept that it was truly over.

Well, was it? As I crossed the street and wandered aimlessly through Powell’s, found myself perched on the Guilder sitting-stairs with a tea and a scone, and then sprinted to catch the Streetcar home, my slow-and-steady realization was that the show was only over in the most literal sense.

If we think about art as not only something to be created and consumed in the moment but something to inspire deeper thinking and beget new ideas, then “The Brothers Size” — a show written in 2009!– is only beginning to work its magic. It brought me face-to-face with so many concepts that I’m going to keep reflecting on and will bring to other shows, my own art, and my sociopolitical understanding of the world.

The thinking and learning doesn’t have to end…. but this blog post does. So I’ll leave it here, very grateful for this unexpectedly three-part journey and anyone who tagged along by reading.

At the end of June I’ll step back into the Armory for the next PCS show, Kamilah’s adaption of “The Importance of Being Earnest” — after a book convention, road trip, wisdom teeth surgery, ballet, V.E. Schwab book launch, and two concerts. See you in 40 days!

Ticket held in front of the stage for Portland Center Stage's "The Brothers Size"

The Brothers Size, Part 2

Retrospectives, Theater

Fast forward twelve days and I’m standing onstage at The Armory looking out over 560 empty seats, riding up a backstage freight elevator with set builders, and standing in the costume shop asking designers about their process as they pin fabric to cast-measured mannequins.

[Freeze frame] Narrator: “You’re probably wondering how I got here. Well, let’s back up…”

Where we left off in Part 1, I loved opening night so much I bought another ticket for closing night and planned to write a second post.

What you don’t know is that a few days later, I saw that Portland Center Stage was also hosting a three-week “The Brothers Size” class led by PCS dramaturg Kamilah Bush. Week one, she would explain the background of the show and the process they took to create it. Week two, students would go on a backstage tour and then see the show. Week three, the class would meet again to discuss.

After a little internal back-and-forth with the reasonable side of me pointing out we were already going to see it twice and this class would be a big time commitment in an already-busy month and it was also a not-insignificant amount of money, and the other side of me being like, “but wouldn’t it be COOL?” you know which side prevailed. I signed up the night before the course started.

What I didn’t realize until I was halfway through registering was that the class was offered through Portland Community College, which meant by signing up I was literally enrolling and I’m now technically a community college student. I have a student ID number and PCC email address and everything. I have to say, it wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card, but this is what happens when you commit to the bit.

So now you’re more or less caught up: tonight was the ‘get a backstage tour and see the show’ night of class. As a longtime PCS showgoer, it was awesome to literally peek behind the curtain and figuratively see how the sausage gets made. It gave me a deeper appreciation for just how many people and how much time and thoughtfulness goes into a theater production.

  • Close-up of what I described in Pt 1 as “neon-lit garb surpassing Coachella standards” (credit to Dominique Fawn Hill, costume designer)
  • Standing on scenic designer Brittany Vasta’s raked stage
  • An out-of-use company dressing room
  • The wig department (all real human hair, apparently!)

Speaking of deeper appreciation, seeing the show after hearing about the history and behind-the-scenes process was also a completely different experience. Reading the script before class, I discovered there are no stage directions whatsoever — it’s up to each production to determine what the characters are doing in each moment. The set and costumes were likewise concepted completely by the PCS team. Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney left all those decisions to the teams who would adapt his work — which Kamilah described as an ultimate form of trust. In class, I also learned how Ogun and Oshoosi are modeled after Yoruba gods of the same names — brothers, one steady and the other flighty. Elegba is a playful figure that represents crossroads with the symbol of a key. (There are echoes of all this within the play.)

Now that I had a better sense of the plot, I could also spend more time observing the micro-dynamics: the relationships in space and word between characters, the transitions into dreams and flashbacks, the guitar-string tension driving the story forward. I also turned my attention to the backdrop, which reads:

“A man that has friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Proverbs 18:24”

Without totally spoiling the show (there’s still time to see it, if you’re reading this before May 18, 2025), that verse really is the heart of the play, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect. The show takes a really hard look at what it means to love someone when it’s not easy, when the way to help them is not clear. I think many people can relate to both Ogun (loving someone and wanting a different life for them) and Oshoosi (being the person feeling that pressure but unable to change your life to fit what they want.)

I’ve taken so much from this show, from this class, from really thinking deeply about the themes it offers and how they fit into my life. I’m incredibly grateful for all these opportunities to dig in. I have one more class next week, and then a front-row seat to the final show of this production.

See you in 11 days!

Two actors sit on a platform, one animated with arms in the sky.

The Brothers Size, Part 1

Retrospectives, Reviews, Theater

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.)

Featuring Austin Michael Young and Charles Grant. Photos by Jingzi Zhao. Courtesy of Portland Center Stage.

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!