Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney

Ivey Award winner Christiana Clark will play Oya in the area premiere of "In the Red and Brown Water" by Tarell Alvin McCraney, to be directed by Marion McClinton.

Christiana Clark in Pillsbury House's "Bulrusher" in 2009 / Photo by Tom Wallace

The play centers on Oya, a young woman from the Louisiana projects who must choose between an athletic scholarship and caring for her ailing mother.

Produced by Pillsbury House Theatre and staged at the Guthrie's studio theater, the play will also feature a list of well-known Twin Cities actors: Ansa Akyea (Shango), Nathan Barlow (The Egungun), Aimee K. Bryant (Shun), John Catron (O Li Roon), Celeste Jones (Nia), Gavin Lawrence (Elegba), Greta Oglesby (Aunt Elegua), Sonja Parks (Mama Moja) and James A. Williams (Ogun).

The play is the first in McCraney's trilogy, called "The Brother/Sister Plays."

Critics have been blown away by the talent of the playwright, still in his early 30s. When his trilogy played in New York in 2009, one critic said McCraney "writes with a passion and urgency that can't be faked and in a style that makes artifice feel like instinct, even as it invests ordinary lives with the grandeur of ancient gods."

A San Francisco reviewer agreed, saying that "in the Red and Brown Water" is written in a "spare, muscular language, packed with sly theatricality and metaphors hidden in plain sight."

The play opens May 12 and runs through June 5.