Interview with Tarell Alvin McCraney

Tarell McCraney

Originally from Miami, FL, Tarell McCraney attended the New World School of Arts High School, matriculated into The Theatre School at DePaul University, and graduated with his BFA (cum laude) in Acting (2003). Currently, Tarell is a third year student in the Yale School of Drama’s MFA playwriting program, headed by Richard Nelson. There Tarell has created 5 new works: WITHOUT/SIN, hailed by Peter Brook as “beautifully written with a truly fresh and open sense of theatrical form,” A LONE; THE BROTHERS SIZE; RUN, MOURNER, RUN; and IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER.  The McCarter literary staff asked Tarell to respond to a few questions:

When did you start writing plays and why?

I’ve been a maker of dramatic plays basically all my life. I still haven’t stopped playing make- believe. Sometimes I make up stories in my head about people I have never met. I imagine what they do in the morning, what their dreams are like, what their favorite colors might be...

I began writing specifically for an audience with a man named Teo Castellanos. He’s an artist based in Miami, where I am from, and he was asked by a rehabilitation center, the Village South, to create a troupe of teenagers, mostly of color, from around the Miami-Dade area, who would go to youth rehabilitation centers, detention centers, and spread a message of HIV awareness and prevention through the vehicle of theater. Sounds like an after school special, I know. But what began to happen, because of the rawness that Teo REQUIRED of us…because we wanted work that both reflected our own complex lives at home and the powerful creative life we were endeavoring in. . .we created works disturbing and palpable so that our peers in the rehab and detention centers cried, told us dark secrets, and we told them ours and we became more of a community. Somehow exploring how we sometimes fall victim to our surroundings, how our parents had sometimes guided us into risky behavior, all of those sharing moments helped us feel not so alone...this is where I began my life as a theater artist. I began to write from myself as source for people who would understand me instantly... That is where and why I began to write.

Who are your greatest influences?
I am heavily influenced by Lorca and Reynaldo Arenas, Essex Hemphill and Alvin Ailey. I love dance. I watch more dance than I do plays. I try to write how I see dance—in moves, in body language that doesn’t lie, in syncopation. Barely anything in the space but bodies that tell you all the story that you need. I am also highly influenced by [director] Peter Brook. He strips everything down to the simplest and rawest form. I am influenced by the street dances that I watched in Miami, the parades, and by my family, how I watched them celebrate and mourn and love and...

Why were you moved to write this play in this form—as part of a trilogy, using Yoruba imagery, with spoken stage directions?  Why does this story need to be told in this way?

The Yoruba have been with me, around me, even when I didn’t know it. From a young age I found myself running into people—Lucumi, Santero, in Miami—who would tell me that I am a child of Yemoja or that the Deities speak to me strongly. Saying things I had no idea what they meant. Eventually I learned more about the Cosmology and thought the IFE, the stories, beautiful in their not so happy endings, in the simple complexities. They reminded me of my own life, how delicate happiness could exist next to pressing tragedy like kith and kin. So I begin to explore.
In The Brothers Size I was trying to explore rhythms, drum-like, but in the voice. In In the Red and Brown Water [another part of the trilogy] I begin exploring the mixing of two stories from two different culture-- Yerma and Oba-- and how they mix, and essentially how those mixtures are what make up the people in Cuba and the Spanish Caribbean, African and European Spanish. And in Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet I explored what the absence of those direct links feels like in African-Americans today. I haven’t proved or unproved anything. Just exploring and using what I know of my life in the South in the swampy areas of the Everglades and Homestead, FL.

But above all the story is a story and we should not forget that it is being told to us by talented artists who want us to feel for the characters and remember that we have all been to this same place that they are evoking.