Narrating Tarell Alvin McCraney's The Brother/ Sister Plays

The Brother/Sister Plays is a trilogy written by the Afro-American playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.The book includes three plays written in separate (In The Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet).They can be read and acted either separately or collectively like many other trilogies. But unlike most plays, The Brother / Sister Plays bear a lot of narrative levels that relate them safely to the art of narratology. Although it is not widely accepted as a narrative form, drama lies at the core of narratological studies. Depending on the different definitions and degrees of narrativity, writers such as Manfred Jahn, Monika Fludernik, Seymour Chatman, Ansgar Nunning and Roy Sommer, to mention few examples, try to apply narrative elements to drama. Their steps towards a narratology of drama are three. First, they state the common literary devices used in both drama and novel (theme, plot, sub-plot, characters, conflict, suspense, poetic justice, ending and closure). Second, they identify pure narrative or diegetic features that linger in drama (narrative agent, storytelling and point of view).Third, they clarify that even mimetic features that are totally dramatic (stage directions and metadramatic elements) can be studied as narrative. The present paper attempts to re- read The Brother/Sister Plays from a narratological perspective, selecting four narrative/dramatic elements – narrator, storytelling, stage directions and metadrama – to achieve two goals. First, that the mixture of narration and performance empowers both telling and theatricality and changes the purpose of narration and performance from mere entertainment and fascination to tackling serious issues. Second, the fusion of narrative techniques into dramatic actions helps the playwright dramatize the untold stories of West African Cosmology, involving the audience in all cases.