Tarell Alvin McCraney is a young black playwright from Miami, educated at DePaul and Yale, who already has a number of plays to his credit, including three running this month in London.

He's a hot property. Starting out as an actor who worked with Tina Landau in Chicago and Peter Brook in Paris, he turned playwright and took off.

But he paused in his trans-Atlantic travels a few weeks ago to launch a play here at City Theatre, where Robert O'Hara directs McCraney's award-winning, mythic sibling drama, "The Brothers Size," opening for previews tonight.

Sitting down for an interview on his whirlwind visit, there was plenty to discuss. Born poor in Miami, with an addict mother who died young of AIDS and a younger brother who spent time in prison, McCraney, wildly talented and just 28, has already lived a life that could fuel a novel or a couple of plays. But we talked mainly about August Wilson.

It seemed a reasonable topic, Pittsburgh being Wilson Central and McCraney being a black playwright who might be expected to have thoughts, admiring or not, about his famous predecessor. I would have been remiss not to bring him up.

Paydirt. It turns out McCraney was Wilson's assistant, as a Yale grad student assigned in the winter of 2005 to support Wilson's work on the premiere of his final play, "Radio Golf," at the professional Yale Rep. It was exhausting, since McCraney was a full-time student. Wilson ran him so ragged, he says, that on opening night he was "in the front row, passed out, asleep."

One day, Wilson sent him off with an envelope stuffed with money to buy him an iPod. He had to drive some distance, so, feeling put upon, he bought the most expensive iPod possible. It was raining, he got back late for class, panting, and tossed it to Wilson.

He hadn't told Wilson his own first full-length play was opening at the Yale Cabaret. But one night, the playwright and the "Radio Golf" cast showed up, throwing his cast into a tizzy: "Omigod, August Wilson is here!"

"The next day," McCraney recalls, "he called me to the cafe where he smokes and writes. 'You repeat a lot,' he said -- this from the man who repeats everything!" He figured Wilson didn't like his play. Then Wilson said, "you have a very strong, clear voice. But you need music" -- and he pulled out the iPod, which he had planned to give McCraney all along.

McCraney remembers at the first "Radio Golf" rehearsal, Wilson read a poem. "We were in tears -- there was an urgency behind it. It takes strength to be that vulnerable. You learn to be fearless about yourself. ... I learned the same thing from Lynn Nottage: You have to get in with the ugly, sometimes it's beautiful."

His favorite Wilson play is "Jitney": "I have to read it out loud, it's totally theatrical. [Arthur Miller's] 'All My Sons' and 'Jitney' are my favorites, with fractured families and ghosts." He says if Wilson wanted your opinion, he'd ask for it: "I learned to do the same thing. I know what I'm working on, know what I want."

McCraney saw Wilson was tired and protected him, fending off interviewers. "In hindsight, it's almost as if I were preparing myself for now. I know the head space you need to write a play. ... August's work is great and I love it, but I also thought there's room for me. As Alvin Ailey said, 'All stories are old. The only thing that's new is you.' "

When the iPod died a couple of years later, McCraney was at the Sundance Theater Lab. "I felt August would want to be there," so he buried it in a Utah river.

McCraney first got into theater when he was 15. He graduated with awards in 1999 from Miami's School of the Arts High School and in 2003 from theater school at DePaul. He studied Shakespeare in England, did a world tour with Brook's company and acted professionally in Chicago before going to Yale.

Everywhere he received awards, including the Cole Porter Award with his 2007 Yale MFA in playwriting. By then, his plays were also winning awards. He has been named International Writer in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2008-10, and is in a seven-year residency at New Dramatist center in New York.

His plays include the Brother/Sister plays ("The Brothers Size," "In the Red and Brown Water" and "Marcus: Or the Secret of Sweet"), the first two of which just finished runs at London's Young Vic. Among a half-dozen others is his latest sensation, "Wig Out!," about two competing drag "houses" ("I wrote it in Drag Vernacular," he told Playbill.com), which opens at London's Royal Court on Nov. 21.

"Brothers Size" has already played in New York, Washington, Dublin and Barcelona. It's at City for the simplest reason, McCraney says: "Because Tracy [Brigden] invited me. She called to say they loved the play and wanted to do a great production and asked who I'd like to direct."

City wanted him involved. Lots of messaging ensued, followed by McCraney's visit. But with a competent director and strong cast (Pittsburgher Joshua Elijah Reese and New Yorkers Albert Jones and Jared McNeill), he found himself serving as "a kind of a cheerleader without pompoms."

Based on Yoruba stories from Nigeria, the play is about two brothers, Ogun, a solid citizen with an auto-body shop, and the younger Oshoosi, just out of jail and trying to do the right thing. Then Elegba, a con man he met in prison, appears. They have mythic parallels -- Ogun, god of iron, and Legba, the trickster -- but it's also a funny, lyrical fraternal drama mixing hip-hop and myth.

McCraney hopes it will "invite the community to have a conversation about brotherhood -- do the bonds hold strong or not?"

He recently told Maddy Costa of The Guardian: "Often we're taught to be different; to keep divides happening. It's an artist's job to do the opposite, to find how we engage and connect."