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. 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 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).
A strong if not entirely satisfying new Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog suggests another way in which the play bridged two eras or dispensations. 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.
Fair enough; most enfants terrible grow into eminences grise at some point. 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. Leon and his actors earnestly plumb Topdog’s significant emotional depths and take for granted the heady metaphorical frame that overhangs them. But these sober-minded choices come at the expense of a certain crispness and surprise. There are laughs here, to be sure, but they ring out under a gathering storm cloud.
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. (Indeed the shoot-Lincoln shtick first appeared in her 1993 absurdist fantasia The America Play.) In George C. Wolfe’s original production, Lincoln (played by Jeffrey Wright on Broadway; I saw Harold Perrineau in the production’s L.A. stop) mined this anomalous spectacle—the stovepipe hat, the battered coat, a schmear of white face paint, a cheap beard affixed over the ears—for all its quasi-vaudevillean bad-taste humor. In the current production, Corey Hawkins’s Lincoln is lean, hungry, and watchful, his Abe costume all but hanging off him, his body attuned more to the sharp turns of his escalating rivalry with his brother than to the meta-theater of his carny gig.
For example: After his brother challenges him to spice up his death scenes, Lincoln has a moment alone in the apartment to improvise a series of increasingly agitated falls, shrieks, and twitches. It’s an opportunity for a bravura solo turn, one of just a couple of scenes he plays alone, and the original production ran all the way with it. (I recall Perrineau’s Honest Abe miming taking a cellphone call, a theatergoing no-no that was then still relatively new yet already considered a capital offense.) Here Hawkins, after a few hilarious flails, sinks morosely into an easy chair with a whiskey bottle.
And so it goes throughout. Leon clearly sees the play in a more straightforwardly tragic register than a complicatedly performative one. Arnufo Maldonado’s set, a cutaway stage that stands apart from elaborate proscenium curtains, puts light air quotes around the action, and Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting homes in on certain key moments. But these are anomalies in a straightforwardly realistic staging, one in which the focus is on the unfolding of the minimal plot. It is driven by contrary if not quite parallel motion: Lincoln, a washed-up former three-card monte savant, has rejected the hustle after the death of a friend, whereas his younger brother, Booth, eagerly wants in on the game. Lincoln insists that he won’t touch the cards anymore, but we know how addiction stories go: By the end of the first act, he’s drawn back to the table, hovering over fast-moving folded cards like a deejay spinning records.
The depressive take on Lincoln shifts the show’s gravity decisively to Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s manic Booth, who steals the spotlight as habitually and as extravagantly as his character boosts clothing, silverware, and girlie mags. For all his abundant, almost heedless magnetism, we can see all too clearly that not only does Abdul-Mateen’s Booth not have the slick monte moves down; he also doesn’t see the scam behind the scam, the sense in which the larger game is always rigged, and no amount of hustling can outwit that. “Thuh first move is to know there aint no winning,” Lincoln tells him, as he claims the play’s penultimate Pyrrhic victory.
Indeed, the play’s inexorable march to tragedy, which some critics have tagged as melodramatic or unearned, lands a bit differently now, and sticks harder in the craw, than it did 20 years ago. It’s not just a post–George Floyd sensitivity to the stakes around racialized violence—the sort of concern that led Antoinette Nwandu to change the ending of Pass Over when it came to Broadway in summer 2021, and has led to heated debates over depictions of trauma vs. Black joy—that sharpens Topdog’s bite here. It’s that the production’s matter-of-fact lack of playfulness around the central “C’mere and kill a president” pitch feels eerily appropriate for an age of ascendant neo-Confederates and assorted fascism-adjacent fellow travelers. (This probably also explains why last year’s revival of Assassins slayed in unsettling new ways.) Whereas The America Play’s original kill-Lincoln attraction had a stark surreality, and the original Topdog retained this lingering whiff of absurdity, the new production takes this insane idea at face value. I am sad to say that it now seems utterly plausible to imagine a world in which certain folks would line up and pay good money to pretend to shoot the Great Emancipator all over again, doubly so if he’s a Black man in the role.
Dystopian literalism bleeds into all the proceedings here, moving like a wheel within a wheel. Afro-pessimism isn’t a genre in which I’d usually place Parks, let alone Leon. But played without winking in a key of aggrieved, stressed-out toxic masculinity, as it is here, Topdog/Underdog is able to hit that note convincingly. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that this play had another card up its sleeve.
