In the above photo, Brandon is manipulating a puppet on an overhead projector as Kasey looks on, laughing, and Millie diligently watches the screen. It is a literally “behind-the-scenes” look at Dog & Pony’s The Twins Would Like To Say, which I co-directed and co-wrote with Devon de Mayo, and which opened on Sunday.

Kasey prepares the next puppet to enter the frame, while Brandon aligns his body to carefully lift a cutout heart, as Millie gets ready for a transition to blackout which she accomplishes with two pieces of cardboard.

It’s a dance of paper and light, made with hands and eyes in rigorous synchronicity.

We’ve been building The Twins Would Like To Say since October. In that time, Millie has been introduced to this shadow medium and to puppetry for the first time. She is a pro now. I love that her eyes are sparkling with concentration, and how she wears a formal sweater and dress, and done-up hair, seemingly at odds with her job as puppet technician. In fact, she’s animating the supernatural thriller The Pugilist (a shadow puppet show-within-our-show) in the few minutes between her intensely emotional scenes as Gloria, the mother of twin authors June and Jennifer.

This image represents the hidden “Twins” I know: the five-month collaborative journey that has asked actors to be dancers, designers to be authors, choreographers to work with text and disco lights. Devon and I believe in collaboration as a procedure and philosophy… asking all our artists to search for the best ways to tell this story. We also believe in total theater for an audience, in immersion, as well as the simple visual or textual gesture distilled from the effort of many minds and hearts.

This collaborative process reflects, I think, our approach to the story itself - we offer itinerant audiences the opportunity to choose their own path through the room in order to see the troubled silent identical twins June and Jennifer from many perspectives - their parents, psychiatrist, school bullies. The Twins, in their journeys through adolescence, throw everyone around them into activity and chaos.

After our final preview, an audience member said to me:”“This is the first theater I’ve seen in a while.” His buddy laughed at him: “What do you mean?” He responded, “This wasn’t trying to be a film or something. It was a live event. It couldn’t be anything but theater.”

That’s a great affirmation of the work Millie’s doing. Crouching behind a screen in full dress and makeup, ready to swipe a sheet of cardboard across the projector to artfully transition to the scene where the tiny puppet dog undergoes surgery - yes, that’s live theater, and couldn’t be anything but theater.

Over the next two months, Millie and Kasey and Brandon will perform The Pugilist 36 more times. Over that span, they’ll get damn good at that shadow show. I love to watch it from an audience’s perspective, seated on the risers. But just one more time I’d like to wander behind the screen and see these actors sweat as they shuffle a tiny paper doctor toward his strange and tragic destiny.

I remember meeting Tarell in NY three years ago, before I had ever heard of The Brother/Sister Plays. We met through one of my closest friends and hung out in NY until five in the morning. We had the best time, exchanged numbers, and committed to keeping in touch. When I got the script for In the Red and Brown Water two weeks later, I had no idea that the man I had met was the playwright. I read the script and I cried. I told my mom before the audition, “I have to do this play! It’s a part of how I was raised. It’s a part of who I am.” Both Tarell and I are from Florida; I’m from Polk County, FL, where it’s just as country and swampy as San Pére. I had no idea that the script I was so in love with was by this tall, beautiful black brother who I had hung out with two weeks prior until I stepped into the audition room. I cannot even express to you the peace and joy that came over my spirit when I saw him in the room, not to mention that auditioning for Tina Landau was a treat in and of itself. Three months later, I was in Atlanta at the Alliance Theatre with Tina and Tarell, working on In the Red and Brown Water.

It is such a blessing and honor to be working with Tina and Tarell at Steppenwolf on the entire Brother/Sister trilogy. When Tarell speaks, it is like listening to a gentle, young genius, and yet also a wise old soul. My favorite playwrights have always been authors like August Wilson, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Stephen Adly Guirgus, Clifford Odets, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, and Lorraine Hansberry: people that are either a generation older than me or who have gone on to be with the Father. But, Tarell McCraney is 11 months (to be exact) younger than I. And not only is he one of my favorite playwrights, he is a friend and a man with great integrity. He has a gift.

And working with Tina Landau has changed my life! She works differently than any other director that I’ve encountered. My mom had 19 kids and Tina actually reminds me of my mother in a way: she makes every actor feel like they are her favorite. Her passion for her work is contagious, she sees actors’ limitations and empowers us to be limitless. She makes the impossible possible.

This is my favorite work thus far in my artistic journey. I’m so thrilled to share this journey with the Steppenwolf. Thank you for reading.

My second experience with Frank was playing Lemon in Aunt Dan and Lemon at Steppenwolf. That play and production remain for me, magical. Marvelous ensemble members in the cast - Molly Regan, Rondi Reed, Tom Irwin, Al Wilder - and Frank, leading us all into the heart of Wallace Shawn’s strange, intense vision. The play is politically very provocative and the audience got… provoked. It was an experience of theater as an intense and meaningful place.

Next was a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Goodman Theatre. First to say, it’s a sublime play - so mysterious and beautiful, and to be given the opportunity to play Hermione under Frank’s direction was a remarkable gift. I remember so clearly one of the things Frank said about the play - and which I take to be deep instruction into the magic of the stage. If you remember, in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare sets up an impossible theatrical demand: a “statue” of Hermione comes to life before Leontes’ (and the audience’s) eyes. The actress playing Hermione sits for a long time as the statue before being coaxed back into life. Rather than try to obscure that moment, Frank moved the action downstage, into closest proximity to the audience, to, as Frank put it, “pressurize” the tension between stillness and life, to push to the fore the question of belief. Frank used the vocabulary of the stage to amplify the truth that Shakespeare was proferring in the play: we believe what we see.

Finally, I played a role in Frank’s production of Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso. Valparaiso is one of thse Steppenwolf productions about which I have had people say both “that was my favorite play” and “I hated that. I had no idea what it was about!”

I love this about Frank: he takes on work that is intense, strange, beautiful, deep and he always assumes the highest intelligence in his audience. He believes in the theater as a place where we uncover our mysteries and he demands of himself the passion and highest craft to respect those mysteries.

I so look forward to starting rehearsal with him on Endgame. I get to be in the room with three other actors - Billy Petersen, Ian Barford, and Fran Guinan - whom I have known for over 20 years. To be together, with Frank, in contemplation of Endgame, this crazy profound play about the human comedy, is our next adventure.

SPOILER ALERT: this post is intended for readers who have already seen The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet and may spoil some surprises within the show. If you are able to attend The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, we ask that you read this post after you’ve seen the production.

Compare the way the stage is used in The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet. In Marcus, the action consumes the entire stage and more, spilling out into the aisles and clambering part-way up a ladder. But in The Brothers Size, four rocks mark the corners of a tightly-confined playing space, surrounded by darkness. As the three characters pace their small enclosure, the space feels restrictive, claustrophobic. The image resonates with the nightmarish confinement of Oshoosi’s prison cell, or his and Ogun’s long nights in their childhood bedrooms, isolated in the darkness behind a closed door. Elegba conflates these two images when trying to help Ogun understand his brother’s experience in prison:

“Prison make grown men scared of the dark again. Put back the boogy monsters and the voodoo man we spend our whole life trying to forget…”

But there are moments when the stage doesn’t have this claustrophobic feel. When Oshoosi and Ogun wail Otis Redding together in the middle of the night, their music soars beyond the walls of the room and the stage suddenly feels cozy rather than confining. The stage becomes intimate because of the close connection between the two brothers.

This duality is a beautiful physical manifestation of the play’s complex treatment of freedom and imprisonment. Even after he’s released, Oshoosi is still confined by his limited opportunities. With the eye of the law and (more benevolently) his brother watching his every move, his movement is constrained within a narrow scope. He dreams of Madagascar, but it seems that he can realistically only travel as far as the Food Lion. Ogun finally gives him his freedom: sending him on down an open road to Mexico and seemingly infinite possibility. But Oshoosi weeps when he’s given the freedom he’s dreamed of. It comes at a cost: he’s never able to see his brother Ogun again, never able to experience the intimacy of that tight room. Similarly, Ogun longs to be freed from his responsibility for his brother. As he tells Oshoosi, “You say I ain’t never been in the pen? Nigga whenever you fall everyone look at me like I fucking pushed you… That’s my life sentence… That’s my lock down… All my life I carry your sins on my back.” But the Ogun we see in Marcus, freed for years from that responsibility, is still mourning the loss of his brother.

SPOILER ALERT: this post is intended for readers who have already seen In the Red and Brown Water and may spoil some surprises within the show. If you are able to attend In the Red and Brown Water, we ask that you read this post after you’ve seen the production.

In an email to the cast before a reading of In the Red and Brown Water for our staff, Tina (Landau, the director) described the play as being “three things at once: a story being told, a dance piece, and a piece of music.” The truth of that statement hit me forcefully the first time I saw a run of the show, and I think it’s one of the most exciting aspects of Tarell McCraney’s work. Of course, all playwrights communicate through image and sound to some extent, but Tarell builds these elements into the very foundation of his plays. Their effect isn’t decorative, nor is it employed sparingly to highlight key dramatic moments, but it is rather infused into each moment of the play.

Seeing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations at the age of 13 taught McCraney the communicative power of movement and image, and he describes it as a transformative experience (click here to see moments from the piece). A dancer himself, he studied with Ailey’s company and continues to regularly attend dance performance today. He described the influence of dance on his work: ”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.”

That last sentence could easily describe Tina Landau’s work. She’s famous for the care with which she sculpts the visual and aural landscapes of her plays: while preparing for The Brother/Sister Plays, she created an iTunes playlist of hundreds of songs and combed the internet for resonant images. This deep synchronicity in their approaches to theatre is easily seen in performance: Tina picks up words and images in the script and the changing music of the dialogue, and, using the Viewpoints technique that she helped to develop, works with the company to reflect in it the movement of the bodies on stage and the sounds they repeat.

One of the most striking examples of this is the use of breath in the play. Oya, the Yoruban orisha who lent her name to Oya in the play, is the god of wind and storms. Tarell reflects this fact in the play by making his Oya a lighting-fast sprinter, and associating her with breath and wind. He writes in the first chorus “Oya in the air Oya… / Say it sound like the wind… / Like a breeze… / A breeze over Oya.” In our production, the company breathes these words like breeze, surrounding an Oya who seems to float on air or water. We hear the heavy exhalation of her running, a sound that sounds like freedom, and helps us to viscerally understand how sprinting makes her feel. This feeling is echoed in the bright, exuberant uplift of her knees in the race. Because of these images and sounds, we experience her elation with her, and we also understand how painful it is to turn down The Man From State’s offer.

What did you think of the use of sound and movement in In the Red and Brown Water? Were there moments where the fusion of image and music helped deepen your experience of the play?