Marcus, or the Secret of Onstage Sex Scenes

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.

"Closer than a brother": The Brothers Size

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.