PRINCETON, N.J. -- Tarell Alvin McCraney moves with the grace of the dancer he once wanted to be. He is tall (6 feet 3 inches), slender and stylish in his perfectly pressed shirt and tie worn over snug black jeans.

This 28-year-old playwright is both celebrated and humble, quietly observant and inspiring, a gay black artist who has made it his mission, he says, ``to give voice to the voiceless.''

And at the moment, the young man whose early life and artistic identity were forged through some impossibly hard times in Miami is also one of the hottest theater talents on both sides of the Atlantic.

Through June 21, the Tony Award-winning McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., is presenting three plays by McCraney, a linked trilogy he calls The Brother/Sister Plays that was co-produced by New York's Public Theater (where it will play in the fall). Last month, he received the inaugural New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award. Soon, he'll fly back to London, where he is International Playwright in Residence with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), though he'll also spend a week working with legendary director Peter Brook on a project in Poland.

He is writing new plays for the RSC, Manhattan Theatre Club and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Though it has only been two years since he earned his master's degree in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, McCraney has had his work produced in New York, Washington D.C., Seattle, New Orleans, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, London, Barcelona and Dublin.

But not, so far, in Miami.

Yet here's the remarkable thing: Though McCraney has been artistically ignored in his hometown, he has a dream that by the time he turns 30 on Oct. 17, 2010, he will be back in Miami starting a theater company.

''I never intended to be just a playwright,'' says the red-hot writer, who has also acted, danced and directed. ``Making a community of theater artists is also part of my job.''

A UNIQUE GIFT

Many of the artists who have creatively crossed paths with McCraney attest that his is a thrilling, distinctive new voice in the world of theater.

Emily Mann, McCarter's artistic director, remembers reading her first McCraney play while he was still at Yale.

'By the second page, I said, `We're doing his work,' '' Mann says. ``His use of language is absolutely distinctive. If you gave me two lines, I'd know they were his. He reminds me of [Federico García] Lorca, Nilo [Cruz], Tennessee Williams, but he's absolutely himself. He's a theatrical poet. His work is very musical and funny -- and it can rip your heart out.''

Director Tina Landau has known McCraney since his undergraduate days at Chicago's DePaul University. She staged the world premiere of In the Red and Brown Water, the first of the Brother/Sister Plays, at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre and directed it again for the McCarter. Next season, she'll direct the entire trilogy -- In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size and Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet -- at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, where the plays will run from January to May.

McCraney's writing, she observes via e-mail, ``embraces a staggering spectrum from the poetic to the prosaic -- it is both gorgeously literate and starkly vernacular. It manages to somehow sound both like rich verse and the street language you'd hear on the corner. . . . Tarell fuses things together -- all kinds of stories, myths, histories, ritual, headline news . . .''

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