Review: The Tarell Alvin McCraney era begins at the Geffen with powerful 'The Brothers Size'

Playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney (“Moonlight”) was appointed artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse last year, but the McCraney era really began on Thursday night with the opening of a muscular revival of “The Brothers Size” at the Geffen Playhouse’s intimate Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater. The play, part of the acclaimed trilogy “The Brother/Sister Plays,” launched McCraney’s meteoric rise in the American theater. McCraney was still a student at the Yale School of Drama when “The Brothers Size” was first produced.

When I saw the play at the Public Theater in 2009 as part of the trilogy, I was keenly aware of being in the presence of a breakthrough talent. What stood out about all three plays (including “In the Red and Brown Water” and “Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet”) was the freedom of the playwriting voice — the mix of lyricism and raw realism, the musicality blending joy and pain and the playful theatricality that trusted the imaginations of theatergoers and turned stage directions into spoken-word poetry. But none of this would have had the impact were it not for the sensitivity illuminating marginalized lives, a sensitivity capable of deconstructing race, class and gender while honoring the cultural soil from which the characters have emerged.

Drawing on West African spiritual traditions, “The Brothers Size” relates the mythic story of two bayou country Louisiana brothers in conflict that is as tender as.