Last week, part one of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays, opened at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley. That two-act play, In the Red and Brown Water, which continues through October 3, 2010, featured a dozen characters played by nine talented actors. Part two, The Brothers Size, which runs through October 17 at Magic Theatre in San Francisco, showcases just three actors in an 80-minute sprint that’s performed without an intermission.
Though written first, The Brothers Size picks up the stories of Ogun Size (Joshua Elijah Reese) and Elegba (Alex Ubokudom) from In the Red and Brown Water (see my review). A few years have passed — Reese’s Ogun now owns the car repair shop that had employed Ryan Vincent Anderson’s somewhat thick-headed version of the character. As for Ubokudom’s Elegba, the open-faced boy Jared McNeill played in Water has hardened and grown up fast. Prison does that to a guy.

Joshua Elijah Reese as Ogun Size
The new kid on the block is Ogun’s younger brother, Oshoosi Size (Tobie Windham), who has also just finished doing a few years of hard time. That’s actually where he got to know Elegba, who looked after the lad when they were both on the inside. Poor Oshoosi: everybody wants to protect him. Ogun worries that the temptations that led his brother to prison will once again seem too inviting, so he busies the young man with work at his shop and lays down the law at home. To Oshoosi, all this tough love feels a lot like being back in the pen.

Alex Ubokudom as Elegba
For his part, Elegba haunts Oshoosi in his dreams and waking hours, using their intimacy in jail as his currency, on the condition, of course, that he not repeat the acts that transpired between them, or even bring them up. We know what obviously happened, but Ogun understands internal-combustion engines better than his brother’s heart.