The diction is folktale formal. The characters are named for Yoruba deities. A woman ululates, for chrissake. The opening passages of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water, and therefore of his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy, have such a powerful African flavor about them that—I’m not kidding—I got confused. Was this story really set in Louisiana, as I’d been led to believe? Maybe I’d misunderstood. Maybe this was some Afro-Caribbean island town, or Lagos.
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Hearing someone belatedly mention the bayou helped surprisingly little. The citizens of McCraney’s fictitious San Pere, Louisiana, are Americans, sure enough. But they’re still profoundly foreign to middle-class me, especially when it comes to their notions of family life. Of course I know that teens who grow up poor and without prospects in an environment lacking a nuclear family structure may latch on to parenthood as proof of self-worth. But it’s one thing to have the information and another to find yourself in the vivid presence of those teens, hearing them celebrate having children at 16. Or, stranger still, watching a romantic triangle become a race to knock up the hypotenuse—in this case, a lovely, talented runner named Oya, after a Yoruba goddess associated with the wind and, ironically, fertility—because, here, you truly don’t have anything if you don’t have a baby.
How? Not by means of scenic devices. Though it has its share of secrets to disclose as it goes along, James Schuette’s set is basically a floor and the undraped, black-streaked back wall of Steppenwolf’s Upstairs Theatre. No, the play’s power resides in McCraney’s dialogue, which tells the facts of life in an out-of-time poetic language that’s often funny and idiomatic but never stereotypically ghetto; in movement that’s dancerly, and sometimes even danced, without oozing over into pretension; and in a phenomenal cast that finds perfect ensemble sync while leaving room for astonishing turns like Alana Arenas’s as a very nearly airborne Oya, Jacqueline Williams’s as clownish yet not-to-be-trifled-with Aunt Elegua, and Glenn Davis’s as the rotten-sweet trickster Elegba.
