(Indeed the shoot-Lincoln shtick first appeared in her 1993 absurdist fantasia The America Play.) In George C. The two central planks of the play’s premise-that two Black brothers have been named, in their father’s “idea of a joke,” Lincoln and Booth, and that the former’s day job is to sit in some kind of nightmare Coney Island dressed as his historical namesake so that patrons can mime assassinating him with blanks-are vestiges of Parks’s impish, carnival-esque early work. There are laughs here, to be sure, but they ring out under a gathering storm cloud. But these sober-minded choices come at the expense of a certain crispness and surprise. Leon and his actors earnestly plumb Topdog’s significant emotional depths and take for granted the heady metaphorical frame that overhangs them. And it turns out that Topdog/Underdog works well in the canonical-revival mold, though there are both pluses and minuses to this relatively reverent approach. Directed with naturalistic brio by Kenny Leon, a seasoned hand with August Wilson, this new Topdog feels closer to a ritual restaging of a consensus classic-i.e., a play by Wilson or Lorraine Hansberry-than to the buzzy re-anointing of a generational talent, creative ancestor of such writers as Aleshea Harris or Jackie Sibblies Drury.įair enough most enfants terrible grow into eminences grise at some point. The slash also points, in its way, to the pivot point the play represents: not only a millennial document of American decline (it premiered at the Public Theater a month before 9/11, then went to Broadway the following spring), but a transition point for Parks, a fiercely original artist whose late-20th-century works came in various flavors of avant-garde, and whose output since has comprised either microtheater shorts ( 365 Plays/365 Days) or relatively straightforward though still aesthetically ambitious dramas ( Father Comes Home From the Wars).Ī strong if not entirely satisfying new Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog suggests another way in which the play bridged two eras or dispensations.
To my eyes, that stroke doesn’t just stand in for the ever-shifting power dynamic between of the play’s down-at-heels brothers, Lincoln and Booth, as they vie over games of three-card monte in a grotty walkup flat. The forward slash in the title has gained weight in the 21 years since the irrepressible two-hander Topdog/Underdog seemed to turn its author, Suzan-Lori Parks, overnight from downtown provocateur into major American dramatist.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins in Topdog/Underdog.
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