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RIFT

Traverse Theatre

Four stars

 

Brotherly love - and hate - are at the heart of Gabriel Jason Dean’s play, which charts the twin journeys of two siblings who respond in very different ways to the emotional baggage they carry with them. The younger begins as a nervous college kid, full of liberal idealism but still awkward around grown ups. Given that his brother he visits at the start of the play has already served four years of a life sentence for murder, no wonder. The fact that his elder sibling has a Swastika tattoo on his chest and is a leading light in a white supremacist group behind bars is something of a shock to the wet liberal system. 

 

Over the next two decades the irresistible rise of the younger as a writer sees both men learn much from each other. As they forge some kind of uneasy truce over the pains of shared history, however, it doesn’t take much for those old bonds to break. 

 

Deans has produced a devastating piece of work that uses the trappings of a prison drama to posit a piercing debate on racism, sexuality, loyalty and betrayal. Drawn from his own experience of having a brother in prison, Dean utilises the intensity of a one-cell setting in the way  the likes of  a Sidney Lumet might. 

 

The result in Ari Laura Kreith’s stark and stripped bare production by the New Jersey based Luna Stage company goes beyond its set-up to show off some of the awfulness of a polarised culture war in ugly close-up. As Outside Brother, Blake Stadnik shows off the development from boy to man as he grows in confidence. As Inside Brother, Matt Monaco is a mercurial dervish who shows off his own emotional complexities as he ages with a resigned demeanour in a slow-burning clash of values and the pains of confinement. 


The Herald, August 5th 2025

 

ends

 

 

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