The epigraph for Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful play The Brothers Size is a quote from proverbs: "A man that hath friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother" (18:12). Closer even than blood is the relationship between a man and God, the proverb seems to say. Yet a queer reading looms right below the surface, and in fact, some translate the subject of the second clause as "lover" or "beloved," rather than friend: "there is a lover who keeps nearer than a brother." Is the beloved closer than the blood brother? When situations get sticky, when your neck is on the line, who knows you better? Who will be there when you cry out in the dark? And ultimately, who will be willing to sacrifice their happiness for your own?
These questions roil just beneath the surface of McCraney's play like the queerness inside the proverb. The Brothers Size tells the story of three men, two bound by blood brothership and two bound by an intimate fraternity borne in prison. The hinge of both of these relationships is Oshoosi Size, named after the Yoruba deity associated with justice, the hunt, and imprisonment. Oshoosi has recently been released from prison and has moved in with his big brother Ogun, who runs a garage. His best friend Elegba, who he met in prison, is happy to see him released from jail and the two re-connect on the outside, only to run into trouble with the law again.
The nature of their intimacy while behind bars is an open question - it was a love that lived in the darkness, and we see it reflected in Oshoosi's dreamscapes and hear it in between the lines of their sparse conversations: "We was like brothers" says Elegba, "Brothers in need." Indeed, the love between Oshoosi and Elegba is palpable (as is Oshoosi's fear of what that love could mean) but the words "gay" "homosexual" or "queer" never cross the lips of any character in this play.
In interviews, McCraney quotes Essex Hemphill, the African-American poet and activist, who said “Two black men loving one another is a revolutionary act." McCraney points out that "He didn’t say ‘two black gay men’, he just said ‘two black men’. It’s something we don’t see. I wanted to put it on stage – these men, in all forms of colour, trying to figure out how to love themselves and each other.”
Both Elegba and Ogun love the childlike, open-hearted Oshoosi. Both try to give him the freedom he craves - literally, both give him cars, that 20th century symbol of "ultimate freedom." But sometimes our ability to give generously to the person we love is limited by the experience of love itself. Sometimes our desire to keep him close overpowers our desire to set him free. Though Elegba's tortured devotion to Oshoosi is strong, it almost lands them both back in the prison they just left.
Near the end of the play, the sometimes-hard big brother Ogun stands on the porch of his house. Speaking his stage directions (as they frequently do in this play) he says "Ogun Size / stands alone in the night / staring." In the fantastic production I saw at the Magic Theatre, this was followed by an intense, attenuated moment of stillness and silence. One of those silences that releases into the audience waves of shifting experience: confusion, then worry that something has gone wrong, then curious attention, then tentative acceptance. Ogun's presence in this long moment was penetrating but impenetrable. It was as though he was simultaneously looking back into the dense, shared past of brotherhood and forward into the delicate tendrils of possible futures that could lie ahead. After this long pause Ogun decides to push his brother forward into the unknown.
The gift he gives Oshoosi at the play's end is the gift of flight. Leaving the elder brother Size alone again on the porch facing the stillness and solitude of his own life. Elegba was at Oshoosi's side when he cried out in the darkened prison; he was the "friend that sticketh closer than a brother." But Ogun makes the choice to unstick in order to set his brother free.
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