LOS ANGELES, CA.- At a time when nonprofit theaters are still recovering from the pandemic shutdown and are looking to connect with their communities, Tarell Alvin McCraney is looking in unorthodox places: prisons, homeless shelters and the foster care system.

One year into his tenure as the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, McCraney, 43, doesn’t just want to expand his audience, he wants the theater to be a place where the marginalized and struggling see themselves onstage and feel welcome.

“The first thing we do is make sure that they can see plays that reflect their lives,” McCraney said in a recent interview, “plays that deal with folks who are in the system, formerly incarcerated, trying to rebuild their lives.”

It is with this priority in mind that McCraney decided to start this season with his own play, “The Brothers Size,” which began previews Aug. 14 and explores the complicated but loving relationship between Oshoosi, just out of prison, and his older brother Ogun. The Geffen has offered free tickets to “populations impacted by incarceration” through its Theater as a Lens for Justice initiative, which McCraney started shortly after his arrival.

The Geffen, which has an annual operating budget of about $15 million and a staff of 45 full-time employees, will do the same with its upcoming productions of “Waiting for Godot,” which opens in November, and “Furlough’s Paradise,” which opens next April.

These types of outreach efforts might not necessarily translate into ticket sales. But nonprofit theaters all over the country are eager to build their audiences at a time when subscriptions have declined; the Mark Taper theater in Los Angeles suspended productions last year.

And Gil Cates Jr., the executive director and chief executive at the Geffen, said the outreach is important to its mission. “Some of those people will be the future of theater,” Cates said, adding that McCraney “brings so many perspectives to the table.”

“The Brothers Size,” which runs through Sept. 8 and is a coproduction with the Shed in New York, draws from the tradition of the Yoruba people of West Africa and includes some movement and live music. It opened in 2007 as part of at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, and has been performed at various theaters since.

Directed by Bijan Sheibani, the Geffen’s upcoming production is part of McCraney’s effort to ensure that people “who are actively trying to restart their lives get a chance to engage the play, have a moment that says, you know that thing you’re going through? I know it. Let’s have a conversation about it,” he said. “And then, for those who haven’t experienced that, to look at folks differently.”

McCraney’s Lens for Justice initiative is a partnership with UCLA’s Center for Justice and with ManifestWorks, which helps those affected by foster care, homelessness and incarceration find job opportunities. “For the Geffen to be so welcoming to us means a lot,” said Michele Mulroney, the president of ManifestWorks’s board of directors. “To get a chance to be educated on the work of the theater is very enriching.”

The Geffen is also providing space and support for the UCLA Prison Education Program’s hip-hop theater course to stage a production that re-imagines “The Wiz,” adapted by incarcerated women. And McCraney is working to bring “Waiting for Godot” to a federal prison in Victorville, California.

“He has the lived experience that informs how he approaches his work,” said Bryonn Bain, a founding director of UCLA’s Center for Justice. “This diversification of the Geffen audience is not just about rhetoric, but is about real change.”

McCraney said he wants to connect with the university as “our largest neighbor.”

“Community is made locally,” McCraney said. “You invite the neighbor over for dinner, they come over, you have a meal, you share stories, they get to know you a little better. And then the invitation extends to, hey, maybe we make a play date for the kids. Maybe we do something else. What are the ways in which we engage? How are we there for each other?”

Writer Christina Ham, who participated in one of the Geffen’s ongoing playwright workshops, said she was encouraged by McCraney’s sensitivity to playwrights and his commitment to new voices.

“It brings to life the dream Joseph Papp had,” Ham said, referring to the founder of the Public Theater in New York, “that theater really is for all.”

Born in Miami, McCraney said he struggled to resist the negative influences in his Liberty City neighborhood — experiences he drew on for his eventual script “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” which became the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight.”

His mother struggled with drug addiction and died in 2003 from AIDS-related complications. His parents separated when McCraney was 10. McCraney and his father, a retired custodian, didn’t always have a good relationship, but he said it has improved over time and that his paternal grandparents were “instrumental” in his education.

His paternal grandmother was a schoolteacher, and his grandfather was a pastor and architect. Young McCraney escaped local bullies by going to the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center near his school, where he started taking free classes in acting, music and dance.

“There is no way I don’t owe my life to a program that says, hey, you have some ability,” he said.

McCraney attended the New World School of the Arts High School in Miami, which was started by Richard Klein, the founding principal of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York.

He’s committed to ensuring that those kinds of crucial opportunities are available for those coming up behind him. “Why was it so hard for me to be able to see Baryshnikov in the White Oak Project?” he said, referring to the dance company founded in 1990 by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris. “Why were there so many barriers of entry to me getting tap shoes or ballet slippers? Why are people really upset that we’re trying to give kids free lunch?”

While young Tarell loved to dance, he said he was not a good dancer. He was better at acting, once able to overcome his shyness. “There is a moment where I can make a decision to be my full self, and be my most vulnerable self,” he said. “It takes a lot — costs a lot. It’s why I respect actors so much.”

McCraney earned his undergraduate degree from DePaul University in Chicago, then attended the playwriting program at Yale Drama School. In 2013, he won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and starting in 2017 served for six years as chair of the playwriting program at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama.

He is also a member of the ensemble at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago — with which the Geffen is doing a co-production of “Noises Off” this winter — and an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain.

McCraney shared the 2017 Academy Award for adapted screenplay with Barry Jenkins for “Moonlight.” His play “Choir Boy,” about a gay adolescent at an elite, mostly Black all-male prep school, was staged on Broadway in 2019.

He wrote “The Brothers Size” (a part of his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy) 20 years ago, when his brother was newly released from jail. McCraney said he grows increasingly frustrated by the criminal justice system’s failure to improve rehabilitation efforts. “Being incarcerated has not gotten any better,” he said. “It’s only gotten worse.”

While some may question his decision to do his own play, McCraney said that theaters have often worked that way — “Shakespeare did his own plays” — and that he deliberately put his in the smaller of Geffen’s two stages, the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, rather than the larger Gil Cates Theater, where “Dragon Lady,” a one-woman play by Sara Porkalob, opens Sept. 4.

“If we’re going to do experimental stuff, and we’re going to get the praise and the pushback, I should get it first,” he said.

Although he has had a taste of Hollywood with “Moonlight” and being in the writers room for the television show “David Makes Man,” McCraney said he remains committed to the stage in a city where theater has often struggled to gain traction.

“There is a kind of intimacy in that connection of the live space, and that’s not in competition or even trying to do the same thing as seeing a film or watching television,” he said. “There is a different feeling when you go into a play. You’re sort of gripping onto your chair like, ‘Wait, what’s going to happen next?’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.