Let’s start with the water: “Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet”, the third installment in wunderkind playwright Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s “Brother/Sister” triptych, finds the residents of fictional San Pere, La., bracing for a hurricane. Daniel Conway’s set conjures the buckets of rain artfully and economically, running jets of of water down a transparent pane at the back of the stage. Somehow it evokes a deluge better than either of the shows I can recall at the H Street playhouse that actually showered water from the ceiling on the actors, taking you out of the story to consider more prosaic matters, like drainage. The rain is about all there is to Conway’s set. Otherwise, the the show sustains the minimalist aesthetic of its forebears, “The Brothers Size” and “In the Red and Brown Water,” which Studio presented in 2008 and 2010, respectively. As in those plays, McCraney puts stage directions in the mouths of his actors, a device that contributes a big laugh in one tense scene wherein a sexual predator seduces a not-unwilling victim — that’d be 16-year-old Marcus, our protagonist, played with great charisma and vulnerability by J. Mal McCree — but is mostly just self-conscious filigree. That’s only a minor quibble: Overall, this show haunts you like a half-remembered dream, powered by a marvelous eight-person cast makes McCraney’s florid dialogue sound natural and real.

Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet