Marcus, or, The Secret of Sweet is the conclusion of Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful Brothers/Sisters Trilogy. It plays for two more weekends at ACT and if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to get tickets immediately and DON'T READ the rest of this post!
Marcus is a character you haven't seen before on the regional theatre circuit. Sixteen, gay, and increasingly "out" in the rural Louisiana projects, he is simultaneously a visionary and a horny teenager. He's a powerful character, who, in my opinion, is betrayed in this production by the director's lack of innovation at specific moments of onstage sexuality.
Over the course of the play, three potentially sexual moments between men unfold onstage: a kiss, the prelude to a blow-job, and a thwarted rape. These moments are full of possibility for the character as well as our own culture. What does it mean for the audience to witness Marcus in these moments of queer black male desire?
In contemporary American culture, black male sexuality remains fraught. Overdetermined by threatening "thug" stereotypes, black male bodies are seen as dangerous at the same time as they are objectified and idealized (like the Old Spice superbowl commercial now gone viral). McCraney's scenes of queer desire place black male sexuality not in relationship to a fearing or fetishizing other, but to itself. "Two black men loving each other," said McCraney in an interview, quoting Essex Hemphill, "is always a revolutionary act."
Ultimately, the director misses these opportunities. Unnecessarily loyal to realistic conventions, he rushes through these queer moments as though ashamed to let them breathe. Because of this hesitancy as well as his reliance on the theatrical equivalent of the cinematic "pan to the windblown curtains," ACT's production doesn't find the specificity onstage that McCraney's language invites.
Overt sexuality in theatre is always complicated. The director's challenge is to strive for an externalized vision of the character's internal experience. Is the sexual moment jolting? Languid? Terrifying? Surreal? Does time slow down or speed up? Does space contract or expand? Moments of embodied desire are always moments out of time, out of space, and sometimes out of the limits of the body itself. These edges of expressibility should be where theatre thrives.
Sexuality is not ancillary to Marcus's story, rather it's very close to the young, beating heart of the character and the play. While I'm happy to see him onstage at ACT, I feel like only half Marcus's heart made it into this production.
Word.
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