This month's Graduate Center Advocate inlcudes my review of Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays.

As much as it would be fun to play iconoclast, [...] I’m afraid that in this case I have to side with the kingmakers: Tarell Alvin McCraney is the real deal. [...] The aesthetic and narrative strategy of [these] plays is to marry the stories of a rural, lower and working class African-American community with the story telling traditions that the playwright clearly believes to be at the root of the the­atrical impulse. [...] McCraney’s efforts to marry the quotidian with the mythic and the gritty with the cosmic will be criticized by some as pretentious, but I never felt he was try ing to inflate the importance of these very personal stories so much as he was reminding us that mythology is personal too, that the telling of stories, whatever their scope or provenance, is always less about connecting us to our invented gods than it is about connecting us to one another.

Full review here.