The allaying hum of the bayou provides a guiding cadence for the denizens of The Brother/Sister Plays, a world in which fireflies ignite as rapidly as a prescient dream. A new voice premiering in both form and linguisticism, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney lilts on both the whimsical and visceral in his characters’ pilgrimages through the projects of New Orleans. The oft-episodic text, now receiving its latest incarnation at Steppenwolf, encompasses three narratives deftly informed by Yoruban folklore and Afro-Caribbean mysticism.

The characters that breathe through this triune echo the powers of Oyo mythology in both name and peregrination. The young female Oya, an ill-fated locus of In the Red and Brown Water, also serves as the Yoruban goddess of wind and change. Shango, Oya’s inured and intermittent lover, similarly reigns over the skies with thunder and lightning. This gnawing potentiality of Moirai hovers closely beside these Louisiana backwaters, a swamp-like everyman’s land in which both mortal and deity can give rise to gale.

Yet McCraney carefully imbues the spiritual with the humane, examining instances of the ordinary by route of the locale’s waggish dilapidation. Indeed, McCraney compels his listeners to navigate the grounded emotionality- gestated by desire, betrayal, loss and desperation- that carbonates the waters of Louisiana.

The trilogy pilots the interconnected, intergenerational lives of a kith inhabiting a metaphysicalized project. Caught between thirsty consciences and familial ties, as well as spiritual doctrine and mortal truth, McCraney’s fodder live in both the celestial and earthly worlds. It is in this literary vein that McCraney has created a genre of transference, confounding the long-obeyed separation of dramatic realism and theatrical fantasticism in exchange for a partnering between the two. This approach does not merely create a new stage amalgam, but rather the inauguration of a form in which genres are permitted to reverberate with one other in the creation of fable. A new conversation between fantasy and reality, performer and community, is subsequently unlocked.

Limned with urbane patois and winking cultural references (two characters in Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet improvise a number from “The Wiz”), McCraney frequently refracts this corporeality through shades of chimera. Characters in McCraney’s world often weave stories of dream and wonderment between such unskinned instances of funeral processions and parole visits.

In the Red and Brown Water, the first and most lyrically-based portion of the work, proffers the tragic story of Oya (portrayed with unrivaled poignancy by ensemble member Alana Arenas), a young woman bequeathed to the ill fates of stasis. Forgoing an athletic scholarship to care for her ailing mother (a powerful Ora Jones), Oya falls for Shango, an asperous and unfaithful soldier. Unable to give birth yet desperate to feel fertile, Oya becomes enmeshed between the worlds of fantasy and reality in her need for fulfillment. Ripe with street vernacular, In the Red and Brown Water invites its audience to purge its preconceptions and adopt a more raw notion of sacrifice, one in which we may partake in our own world. The ceding of body, mind, and sexual innocence are particularly at rise in the text.

Like its siblings, In the Red and Brown Water is told through choreographed poeticism. With the rhythmic tapping of water basins parroting McCraney’s dialectic meters, In the Red and Brown Water aptly sets itself inside designer James Schuette’s barren set.

The latter section, inclusive of both The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet encompasses a more naturalistic, cross-generational narrative clip. In the arresting, albeit truncated, The Brothers Size, Ogun (a harrowing K. Todd Freeman) wrestles with the return of his brother, Oshooshi (the versatile Phillip James Brannon), a young man who has been granted asylum from the penitentiary only to bout with more trouble. Marcus gives voice to the intersectionality between homosexual identity and the African-American community. Fearless in its conceit, Marcus addresses both the comically awkward and harshly belittling encounters that can meet young LGBT-identified individuals. Though at times bordering on crutches of caricature and archetype, Marcus blisters with honesty in its depiction of the agony that befalls all rites of budding sexuality.

Perhaps what is to be most seminal about this triadic work is the pairing of two uniquely artistic conductions. McCraney’s text receives its syncopated pulse from Tina Landau’s intricately calculated, yet incredibly lyrical, direction. Employing aspects of the Viewpoints method (which she developed with cohort Anne Bogart), Landau sculpts her performers both physically and mentally into tableaus that enlighten McCraney’s words. Using Scott Zielinski’s lighting design, Landau has created a palate of narrative reflexivity. Silhouettes in projected shadows create a sense of dual habitation. Landau entices her audience to live in, and be aware of, all domains upon which the stories unfold, both human and otherwise.

Landau has also ushered her inquisitive search for the living community through McCraney’s dialectics. Performers in The Brother/Sister Plays often announce their own stage directions, including shifts in psychological states, to conceive a more candid platform of storytelling. One receives the sense that the story is meant to be both felt through the body and heard through the ear, a conscious reminder that our contemporized conceit of theatre still roots itself in the oral telling. It is introspective aspects such as this, while swiftly moving along the underbelly of the text, that suggest a most prolific future for these two partnering artists.

“The Brother/Sister Plays” runs through May 23, 2010 at Steppenwolf. For tickets or more information, please visit www.Steppenwolf.org.