I feel like we should start a new blog category, just for feature stories on Tarell Alvin McCraney. Here’s an article from the UK’s “The Evening Standard” about Tarell and Wig Out, which is playing at the Royal Court in London.  I like this article because it has a different focus than some of the other Tarell articles, of which there are many…  Click here, or read below.

Tarell Alvin McCraney

The sexiest writer in town
By Nicholas de Jongh
24.11.08

When Tarell Alvin McCraney, the sensational writer voted Most Promising Playwright at today’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards, was a young schoolboy in Florida he quite often used to be beaten up. He got used to it. The scene was the poor, black streets of Miami in the early Nineties. He would be attacked and verbally abused on the streets and at school.

Once, when going to dance class - it remains his governing passion - he wore shorts and a T-shirt instead of formal dance clothes because his mother was too poor to buy them. He recalls how he was then set upon by a group of black boys on the street. It is important to report that they were African-Americans, because the incident says something particular about the working-class black culture in which he grew up.

“They were calling me punk, which means arsehole, which means gay,” he says, as he sits in the Royal Court café where previews of his play Wig Out!, about pre-operative male-to-female drag queens, transvestites and the odd straight boy, are already causing those extraordinary flurries of excitement and rumour that the shock of the new or different often causes.

“They broke a tooth and I was left with a swollen jaw,” he says. But why, I wondered, did they go for him? What had he done? What offence had he caused? “They didn’t need much reason to beat you up,” says the 28-year-old McCraney, who has grown up to be tall and handsome. He moves like a dancer, loose-limbed and flowing, elegant in a cool, understated way. His voice never rises above medium-quiet.

“They would call me white boy, which meant I was too effeminate, and they had this game called knock-down/stay down. One by one they would hit you until you fell. They kept calling me faggot, punk, sissy, though I didn’t even know what gay was.”

He stood there and took the blows until one of the boys who had already tried to bring him down whispered that it would be better to fall, because once he had they would stop tormenting him.

Today in London you would at most only stop to give him an admiring glance. He fits naturally into the capital’s scenery. Within the space of a year he has become accepted here as the hottest young American playwright of the time. That he will have had three fine plays, The Brothers Size, In the Red and Brown Water and Wig Out! all performed at major London theatres in less than a year is a tribute to the rare excitement that his dramas inspire. West African mythology, Yoruba demons, voodoo and hip hop give his plays a strange dynamic. His characters live in hard-pressed, suffering, impoverished circumstances. (more…)

Tarell Alvin McCraney

Wanna read about a hot new writer who is constantly in the news, both nationally and internationally?  Here is the latest list of recent articles on Tarell Alvin McCraney, creator of The Brother/Sister Plays (and also Wig Out, currently running at the Vineyard Theatre).

• The New Statesman: Artists Tackle Ten Existential Questions

• The Observer: Rising Star

• Theatremania:  Size King

• Playbill.com: Brief Encounter

• AAPEX: Miami Playwright Honored in NYC

• Metro, UK:  Building on Traditions

• The Independent:  Close-Up

• Broadwayworld:  Wig Out Extends Its Run

• Financial Times: Past Master

• The New York Times: The Week Ahead

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

Tarell Alvin McCraney

The Times of London has just published a nice article on Tarell Alvin McCraney, the almost-28-year-old playwright of The Brother/Sister Plays.  Two of the plays in the triptych (oooh, new word!) are being produced by The Young Vic, and this preview article was published in anticipation of them.  Read the article below, and click down to see The Young Vic’s video preview of In the Red and Brown Water.

TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY:  OUT OF THE HOODS
HIP writer Tarell Alvin McCraney has left Miami vices behind

By Louis Wise, The Times

Tarell Alvin McCraney might be a playwright, but he should really write a manual: How to Succeed, the Faux-Naïf Way. He’s explaining how he put acting aside to write The Brothers Size, one of last year’s critical hits in both London and New York. “I just thought, ‘I wish I had a part where I could bring all of myself to it - not just the proper English-speaking self, but the weird, loony, mercurial stuff.’ I thought, ‘Somebody should be doing this.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh! I should do it!’”

It is a rather simplified take on the route that led Miami-born McCraney to have two more works debut here this autumn: In the Red and Brown Water at the Young Vic, then Wig/Out at the Royal Court, while The Brothers Size returns to the Young Vic, then tours. It also cuts out the award-winning spell at Yale, and mentoring from Peter Brook. Still, in one sense, the speed-up is justified: he turns 28 this month.

In the Red and Brown Water succeeds The Brothers Size in McCraney’s Brother/Sister trilogy - relocating Nigerian myth to the heat of contemporary Louisiana. Spirits and gods become African-Americans at the bottom of the social heap, in the projects. The writing is a verse-like take on modern slang and patois - and the result is poetic, potent and funny, punctuated with music and dance. (Wig/Out, which has just opened to rave reviews in New York, is set in the transvestite ball scene.)

Despite the pressure around him, McCraney is almost unnervingly calm and polite. He answers questions at length and rarely loses eye contact. The only thing that sets him off course is an unfortunate pain au raisin, which has each of its raisins plucked out, one by one. Intense, perhaps, but intensity is sometimes necessary. While, for some, the stage has become a means of supporting a cause, for McCraney theatre itself is the thing to fight for.

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Marc Damon Johnson and Keith Chappelle in the 2007 McCarter IN-Festival production of The Brothers Size, photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Our final show of the season, the world premiere of The Brother/Sister Plays, is written by an extremely exciting young playwright. Tarell Alvin McCraney is a recent Yale School of Drama grad and has already received a number of awards, including the Whiting Writers’ Award and the inaugural Paula Vogel Playwriting Award. (In other words, he makes me feel very unaccomplished.)

In The Brother/Sister Plays, McCraney weaves southern rhythms and Yoruban culture into modern-day urban stories. The result is a piece full of kinship, heartache, family, and legacy—epic in scope but still rich and intimate.

McCarter’s production of The Brother/Sister Plays is sort of a two-fer. Well, actually, it’s more like a three-fer. But really, it’s all one show. Confused? Let me explain.

The “three” comes from the fact that The Brother/Sister Plays is a trilogy comprised of three separate plays: In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet. Each play can stand on its own, but when performed together, they also form one cohesive, emotionally resonant unit. For example, all three plays take place in the same fictional Louisiana town, and many characters appear in multiple plays.

Which brings me to the “two.” As you can imagine, three plays back to back would make up a considerable running time. And no matter how engrossing the show may be, I don’t think there are many people who’d want to park themselves in one seat for an entire day.

So, the solution was to split the plays up into two halves. In the Red and Brown Water makes up Part 1, while Part 2 will consist of The Brothers Size and Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet.

Three plays, two evenings, one theater. Got it?

Here’s how it all breaks down:

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