At 33 years old, Tarell Alvin McCraney has skyrocketed to fame. His plays are produced on stages around the world, his adaptations are praised, and his awards include a residency with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2008, election to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company Ensemble in 2010, and a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellowship in 2013. But in McCraney’s eyes, success is not measured in accolades, but in achievements; awards only matter if “the award buoys the work—makes it more fascinating to people, more acceptable.”
McCraney’s preoccupation with the resonance of his work comes as no surprise: he came to theatre not through entertainment, but through emotional necessity. McCraney grew up in a world that could literally blow apart at any moment. Born to a mother grappling with drug addiction, he was raised in a violence-wracked housing project in Miami after his family lost their home to Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Theatre became a means for McCraney to find community. He first discovered it in the everyday ritual of church: watching his grandfather preach, he was electrified by the call-and-response nature of the sermons, by the counterpoint of drumbeats and organ tones, and by the collective engagement of minister and ministry alike. Moving on from high school to DePaul University for his undergraduate degree, and from DePaul to the Yale School of Drama for a MFA in playwriting, McCraney continued to mine the everyday for moments of theatrical clarity. That investigation led to what many agree was the catalyst to McCraney’s success: The Brother/Sister Plays.
The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy—The Brothers Size (Studio, 2008); In The Red and Brown Water (Studio, 2010); and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet (Studio, 2011)—trace the lives of a group of family members, friends, and lovers as they fumble through their own ordinary stories of redemption, devastation, and self-discovery. Setting their stories against the backdrop of a tumultuous Louisiana bayou, and drawing their discoveries from his own journey, McCraney imbues his characters and their ordinary lives with a heightened theatricality and epic significance. McCraney continues to explore the epic in everyday struggles for identity and survival: Choir Boy juxtaposes the identity politics of a black all-boys prep school against the swelling spirituals of the school’s gospel choir; Head of Passes, which premiered at Steppenwolf in 2013, aligns one woman’s crisis of faith in the aftermath of a natural disaster with the Book of Job. “Clearly, he’s the real thing,” declares Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater. “He’s someone who is utterly committed to using theatre for stories that otherwise don’t get told and reaching people who otherwise can’t be reached.”
“In a world where stories are told in many beautiful and spectacular ways,” McCraney adds, “the live theater still has the powerful construct of communal journey, communal belief, community.”
—Erin Washburn