When it comes to GableStage’s new production of “The Brothers Size,” you know you’re in for something different even before Artistic Director Joe Adler makes his customary introduction. In a wordless preamble to the 70-minute play, three men walk down one of the aisles in the fully lit theater. Two of
them play homemade instruments, while the other engages in a kind of ritualistic modern dance. They continue toward the unadorned stage for a few minutes. One of them passes across the projected black backdrop while another lies on the stage, unmoving (dead?).
Before the story even begins, we’ve been lulled into such a compelling trance that I was sorry to see Adler break it with his intro. But rest assured, there is plenty more strangeness in this southeastern premiere of a challenging work by Miami theatre graduate Tarell Alvin McCraney.
First of all, there’s the “Our Town”-like nature of the proceedings. The three characters navigate a propless stage, forcing us to imagine the homes, cars and garages where most of the story takes place. The actors have nothing to work with aside from their costumes, mostly functional sweatpants tied around the waist. Then there’s the way the characters announce their stage direction in the monotonous tones of objective narrators (i.e. “Elegba enters,” Elegba says before entering the house and shifting into his character), which has the effect of distancing the audience and therefore diminishing the emotionality of the piece. In still another avant-garde flourish, the stage becomes more than just the setting of the action of any particular scene – it becomes a sort of existential limbo for the characters not involved in said action. They’re usually hanging around somewhere, waiting for their moment, which often comes in the form of a bell, signaling scene transitions like round changes in a boxing match.
This is an appropriate metaphor given that, underneath McCraney’s unorthodox style is a universal, even familiar study of to brothers at odds, boxing through their differences with words instead of gloves and finally emerging with a painful acceptance. This is a play that understands profoundly the eternal bonds of brotherhood, the love-hate dichotomy that so many kin share. The brothers in question are Oshoosi (Ryan George), a newly released convict and layabout, and Ogun (Sheaun McKinney), the older and more responsible proprietor of an auto repair shop. Oshoosi wants desperately to go straight, but trouble follows him around every corner thanks to his best friend Elegba (Teo Castellanos), who harbors a secret along with a potentially stolen car and enough powder cocaine to send them both to prison.
McCraney, a New World School of the Arts graduate, is African-American, and so is his cast. In addition to its myriad themes – brotherly love, betrayal, guilt, sexuality – “The Brothers Size” is filled with probing insights into being black in America, observations that ground this mystical experience into a specific time and place (the “distant present” in the Louisiana bayou). Once you peel away the play’s detached style and the actors’ affected performances (they have to change on a dime from bloodless narration to deep emotional immersion, and they do it well), this is a remarkably similar work to “Masked,” GableStage’s previous production, also about the blood feud between minority brothers (Muslims, in that case). The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“The Brothers Size” is at GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables, through Oct. 2. Tickets are $37.50 to $47.50. Call 305/445-1119 or visit gablestage.org.
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Elsewhere in Gables this week, the Coral Gables Art Cinema is joining forces with Books and Books and the Centro Cultural Espanol to honor Spanish filmmaker David Trueba. In a program organized by Nat Chediak, founder of the Miami Beach Cinematheque and former Miami Film Festival director,
Trueba will speak at the Centro Cultural Espanol (800 S. Douglas Road, Coral Gables) on Thursday night and will sign copies of his book “Learning to Lose” at 2 p.m. Saturday at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. And finally, beginning on Friday, the Coral Gables Arts Cinema will screen three of Trueba’s recent films, all of them South Florida premieres (one of them, “What Ever Happened to Jorge Sanz?,” is a U.S. premiere).
It’s an exciting multimedia celebration for a filmmaker, novelist and journalist I’m somewhat ashamed to have never heard of, so I viewed two of the Trueba films last week with anticipation. Though the movies vary immensely in tone and genre, both reveal Trueba to be a sentimentalist and a conventional studio director – disappointing revelations for anyone expecting the work of a filmmaker with art-house sensibilities.
“Soldiers of Salamina,” Trueba’s fact-based drama from 2003, is the better of the two movies I screened in advance. It’s about Lola (Ariadna Gil), a blocked writer whose article on the anniversary of the Spanish Civil War sparks a latent investigation into the near-execution and life-saving forest escape of nationalist writer Rafael Sanchaz Manzas in the late ‘30s. While trying to kick a smoking habit and awkwardly befriending a lesbian psychic, Lola interviews soldiers, survivors and relatives of victims, piecing together what may be the book that will resurrect her career.
Flashing back and forth between Manzas’ treacherous escape and Lola’s contemporary reportage, “Soldiers of Salamina” is best when it delves into the sausage-making of investigate journalism: how disconnected fragments culled from multiple interviews conjoin to form a narrative. It works a bit like the
recent art-house hit “Incendies,” but without the intensity. Beneath a handsome, Oscar-pandering polish, deep emotional investment is always a hair’s-breadth away, and by the end, Trueba has resigned himself to mushy sentiment to make up for it.
Still, it’s a major step up from the interminably long “Welcome Home,” which Trueba released in 2006. Though it predates “Knocked Up” by one year, it’s easy to dismiss “Welcome Home” as the Spanish version of Judd Apatow’s pregnancy-panic comedy; it too centers on a couple (this time an established one) dealing with an accidental pregnancy. There are similar scenes of relationship fallout, with immature leading man Samuel (Alejo Sauras) taking refuge in his friends – a gang of eccentric misfits at the news magazine at which he has recently taken a job as a photographer (This is where Trueba mines the majority of the movie’s ostensible humor, by introducing a blind movie critic, an anticapitalist business writer and a sportswriter who hates sports, to name but three. Ha-ha).
Knowing that this is a saccharine, utterly vanilla Hollywood-style morality comedy, I don’t need to tell you that Samuel learns the error of his ways, but just wait until you see the ludicrous conceit that inspires his love of child-rearing. It would be one thing if I saw this stuff in a ‘40s Preston Sturges comedy, but Trueba prefers to set his gooey slapstick in a seemingly realistic environment, torpedoing both the comedy and the realism.
That said, I’m glad the Coral Gables Art Cinema is doing retrospective work like this and presenting films that nobody else is showing. I hope they do more of them in the future.
“Soldiers of Salamina,” “Welcome Home” and “What Ever Happened to Jorge Sanz” open Friday at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Call 786/385-9689 or visit gablescinema.com.
