A stunning new chapter at The Geffen

There are nights when you walk into a play and before the first line is spoken you know you’re in for a remarkable experience.

Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size at the Geffen Playhouse is one of those nights.

The irony, when you walk into the small theater at the Geffen, is there’s almost nothing there: an empty space. The stage is a bare black circle surrounded by two rows of audience seats. You notice the lights, simple white light. But if you look closer, you’ll notice a logic, an almost sculptural elegance. You’ll see the circular patterns echoing the stage: a sense that it’s not just the light that will help focus the space but the very materiality of the lights themselves. Your ears will draw you to a single musician, Stan Mathabane, nestled in amongst the audience chairs. There’s a djembe, a talking drum, a drone flute, even a saxophone. While the audience enters (and you should get there early for this), he’s beginning to layer individual instruments over a loop (another circle) slowly accumulating a culture of sound and an interplay of rhythms and cries.

Three black actors enter, not so much walking, but absorbing the space before them and transforming it. As the opening lines of the play’s poetry fill the space, one of the actors creates a white circle defining the playing space with a white powder. Magic: a whole world is essentially created out of nothing.

Tarrell Alvin McCraney is not only the playwright, he’s also the new artistic director of the Geffen. When, in his season announcement, it came out that the very first play of his new tenure would be his own, I wasn’t sure how to feel. It was a high-stakes gesture. Here was a play that had been produced before in LA at the Fountain Theatre. The rare playwright/artistic director running a significant American theater. Would this seem selfish? Arrogant? Had it gone poorly, it would have been more than just a bad first production. It could have thrown into question both his art and his leadership. If it worked out? Well, what a way to start –– proudly claiming both your art and your artistic vision.

Brothers Size is a play you have to see. It is one of those nights in the theater that will spin through your nights for years. Get tickets now, they are going to be hard to come by.

The story of the play, on the simplest level, is the story of two brothers, the Brothers Size –– Oshoosi and Ogun. Ogun is the stable one. The one who is up working every morning. Oshoosi is the mischievous one. The one with a big smile. 

It’s also the story of Oshoosi and Elegba, who form a different brotherhood. Both are just out of prison where they formed a bond both loving and fated.

What will jump out at you about the text is its poetry and its theatricality. From the opening lines, characters will say their own stage directions –– both as emphasis and as aside –– reminding us that we are watching a play as they pull us deeper into it. The text requires of its actors a mercurial precision, shifting from one reality to another seamlessly and fluidly.  

Physically the world is created through the actors' bodies and the precise direction of Bijan Sheibani. No formal set or props to speak of, but to say it’s a physical theater piece doesn’t do the play justice. That ethereal poetry and movement is juxtaposed by a painfully real, vulnerable questioning of what we’ll do for love. 

The performances of all three actors (Alani iLongwe, Malcolm Mays, and Shaun McKinney) are stunning. They traverse the textual challenges and the exacting choreography and infuse it with vibrant life. We go from the abstraction of metaphoric movement to a step routine to lip-synching over Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” Somehow, it’s as joyous as it is tragic.

Don’t miss this one.  

If this is the beginning of a new chapter at Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s Geffen Playhouse, I’m all in.

The Brothers Size plays at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood through September 8th.

This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.

Neil LaBute Tries to Push Our Buttons

It’s hard to imagine the perfect audience for Neil LaBute’s world-premiere play, If I Needed Someone, at City Garage.

It’s late at night and we’re in Jules’ studio apartment. She invited Jim over after a night out. They stopped at a bodega on the way home to get beers that they probably don’t need (she certainly doesn’t). They chug one anyway. It’s not really a first date, but it is their first time. It’s more of a, "Hey, we just hooked up at a party. What now?" The "What now?" is familiar to any love story and this play is really about the "What now?" in the age of consent. Even saying this is a play in the age of consent indicts what came before — the age of no consent.

Neil LaBute’s breakout title was In the Company of Men, which he originally wrote as a play and then adapted and directed as a film in 1997. As one summary frames it, “Two business executives — one an avowed misogynist, the other recently emotionally wounded by his love interest — set out to exact revenge on the female gender by seeking out the most innocent, uncorrupted girl they can find and ruining her life.” Cheery, right? LaBute’s work is designed to push buttons. If you look at it charitably, his work is an unflinching look at sexual politics and misogyny. If you’re a little less charitable, it’s just misogynistic. If you give voice to a character who says awful things, are you championing that character? Those thoughts? Or by revealing the ugliness are you helping us to recognize how brutal our world is?

At its best, LaBute’s work plays more in your mind than it does on the stage or screen. Do you identify with what’s being said? Do you agree? Are you like them? Do you judge them? Those questions running through your head are part of the dance.

If I Needed Someone isn’t nearly as challenging as some of LaBute’s early work. In many ways, it’s quite tame. The 90-minute play is consumed with how two late 20s/early 30s people navigate a world where #metoo, consent, and boundaries are as much a character in their romance as the man and woman. Jim is consumed with what it means for a man now. One false move and he could get fired, or at least called into HR. Jules is up for being very upfront with her boundaries: "You can come in, but you can’t stay over." Neither one of them is a particularly likable character. Jim’s concerns about being misread or making one innocent mistake pale in comparison to Jules’ concerns about actually being the victim of physical or sexual violence. She isn’t drawn in the most flattering light either, a vomiting drunk mess who seems to be sending mixed signals at every moment. You might have moments of feeling empathy for one of them but LaBute doesn’t let you get too close for too long.

You feel like there’s going to be some major plot twist, some reversal, or maybe an act of violence or passionate love. It’s a bit like one of those horror movies about the quiet, awkward trip to the lake that ends up being... just a quiet, awkward trip to the lake. The subheadline would seem to be, "Gosh, it must be hard to date after college in the current climate of sexual politics."

Here’s where the question of audience — "Who is this play for?" — comes to the fore. This isn’t quite a play for folks in their 20s or 30s. It’s written with an odd nostalgia or awareness of a time "when guys could just be guys." For folks amid this reality, I imagine the play is a bit like explaining how to use a rotary phone to someone who’s only ever used an iPhone. It’s not a struggle that’s even familiar, much less relevant.

And it’s not really a play for your typical 2 AM-beer-trip-the-bodega theater audience. On the walk to the parking lot, I heard two different couples asking a version of, “Did you identify with her?” or “Do you think like him?” but not shocked or offended — more in a "Thank god we weren’t like them." way.

Perhaps the oddest twist of the whole night is that it actually has a happy ending.

If I Needed Someone plays at City Garage in Santa Monica through September 8th.

This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.