The Brothers Size

The Brothers Size 

By Tarell Alvin McCraney 

Co-Directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Bijan Sheibani 

The Shed (Co-Produced with the Geffen Playhouse) 

New York, NY  

September 6, 2025 

Reviewed by Isaiah Matthew Wooden 

In the nearly two decades since Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size debuted Off-Broadway as a part of the third Under the Radar Festival, the evocative three-hander has garnered considerable praise for its trenchant, poetic dramatization of some of the lasting questions shaping the lives and relationships of Black men in the United States. Audiences and critics alike have found much to admire in McCraney’s shrewd fusion of ancient tales drawn from Yoruba cosmology with given circumstances and dramaturgical devices of his own making that invite reflection on such themes as brotherhood, masculinity, vulnerability, love, and freedom. No doubt adding to the play’s appeal are the rich opportunities it affords the actors portraying its central trio—Ogun Size; his younger brother, Oshoosi Size; and Oshoosi’s close friend and former cellmate, Elegba—to flex an extraordinary range of performance muscles. The play’s return to New York City in 2025 in a co-production by The Shed and the Geffen Playhouse reaffirmed its status as one of the most compelling and resonant dramas to spotlight and interrogate the intricacies of the inner lives and social worlds of Black men.  

Co-Directed by Bijan Sheibani and McCraney, and featuring three actors who have achieved notoriety for their stage and screen work, André Holland (Ogun Size), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and Malcolm Mays (Elegba), this revival was remarkably elegant in its simplicity, relying mostly on the physical and vocal agility of its performers to bring expressive clarity to the details of their respective characters’ at once mythic and mundane journeys. The integration of live music by Munir Zakee and choreography by Juel D. Lane enhanced the overall rhythm of the performance while also reinforcing the sense of call-and-response that McCraney’s striking incorporation of spoken stage directions aims to evoke. Suzu Sakai’s spare set design, which was anchored by an improvised circle marked out with a white, chalk-like substance in a clear nod to the symbolic spaces central to various syncretic spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, further bolstered the production’s invitation to audience members to embrace their roles as co-creators of the storytelling. This necessarily created space for some of the play’s more distinct features, including its setting in a fictional town in the Deep South at some point in the “distant present,” to accrue fresh significance, while also allowing Holland, iLongwe, and Mays to embody their characters with incredible specificity and vitality.

Given Holland’s longstanding connection to The Brothers Size and to McCraney’s work more broadly—he played Elegba in the 2009 staging of the play co-produced by The Public Theater and the McCarter Theatre Center, and also starred in the McCraney-penned films Moonlight (2016) and High Flying Bird (2019)—it was especially moving to witness the layered complexity he brought to his portrayal of the elder Size brother. While Oshoosi often admonishes Ogun for moving through life with unnecessary hardness, Holland was deliberate about endowing the character with charm and tenderness. His insistence on surfacing the character’s multidimensionality made moments like his recollection of the suffering endured by his former lover, Oya, or his account of always getting blamed for Oshoosi’s troubled behavior during their youth, reverberate long after the action had shifted focus elsewhere. The sensitivity of Holland’s performance came into sharpest focus in what remains one of The Brothers Sizes’s most touching and restorative scenes. When Oshoosi yet again finds himself teetering on the brink of captivity by a criminal legal system that views all young Black male life as fungible, the elder Size brother commands that his sibling flee their distressed hometown as soon and as fast as possible. The boom and quake in Holland’s voice as Ogun vowed to deny his younger brother up to three times when the Law came looking for him, deepened the emotional intensity of the duo’s final embrace and, in so doing, further distinguished Holland as one of the most dynamic interpreters of McCraney’s sublime language. 

iLongwe and Mays likewise proved adept at surfacing the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of McCraney’s dramaturgy. The tremendous energy and vigor of iLongwe’s Oshoosi served to punctuate how the character’s relentless yearnings to make freedom mean something often complicated his everyday life. Indeed, while Oshoosi’s articulated aims to acquire a car and find a woman registered as pretty straightforward, at least at first blush, iLongwe’s nimble portrayal called attention to the ways they were symptomatic of his much larger aspirations to imagine and enact possibilities unencumbered by carceral and other oppressive logics. This accounted for the powerful hold that Mays’s spry and clever Elegba seemed to maintain over Oshoosi’s life. Much like the orisha of the same name, Elegba often appears at key moments of decision-making in the play, reminding Oshoosi of the beauty and power inherent in choices. Mays’s portrayal of Elegba as simultaneously sweet and crafty amplified his allure for Oshoosi while shedding light on why Ogun remained so deeply suspicious of the pair’s friendship.

The minor script revisions McCraney made for the production underscored the crucial role that love—familial, platonic, erotic, and otherwise—can play in sustaining the bonds between Black men. These updates, paired with McCraney and Sheibani’s sleek staging, Adam Honoré’s subdued lighting, and Dede Ayite’s practical costumes, not only sharpened the overall storytelling but also accentuated the play’s enduring emotional and thematic resonances. Simultaneously and significantly, they enabled the production to make a persuasive case for why The Brothers Size’s stirring explorations of Black men’s interiorities and vulnerabilities marks it as a singular and transformative work of twenty-first-century theatre.