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Topdog/Underdog
Suzan-Lori Parks

    In the fall of 1988 a play opened in a tiny theater in downtown Brooklyn with the daunting, evocative and ambiguous title, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Its neophyte author was a 21-year old African-American woman, Suzan-Lori Parks. Usually, such presentations receive (if they're lucky) minor mention in alternative newspapers, but word soon began to spread among those interested in new theater that something extraordinary was on view in Brooklyn.
    Indeed, the adventurous few who made the journey to see the play had that rare experience of hearing a genuinely original dramatic voice. As with, say, the very early surreal plays of Sam Shepard, the play-goer wasn't quite sure what she saw and heard, but nonetheless was bowled over by the sheer theatrical force of visual and verbal imagery. What the young playwright had achieved in this startlingly mature, linguistically inventive play was to move beyond its disparate influences to create her very own dramatic vision. There were echoes of Beckett, Ionesco, early Shepard, Fornes, but there was as well the rumble of African-American and feminist protest drama, not in a predictable, polemical sense, but elliptically, suggestively.
    This distinctive jazz-like style of running with a riff of interpretation found further expression in Parks' subsequent plays. The America Play, set in a theme park called the "Great Hole of History," ruminated on the Black presence in America, a history which is in reality an absence, since our national mythology has been created by the white master class. In the first act of this play a gravedigger called the Founding Father demands mythological entry, inviting customers at a side-show performance to re-enact Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth.
    Now, almost a decade later, Parks has journeyed successfully to Broadway--and a Pulitzer Prize--with Topdog/Underdog, a play which seizes the Lincoln assassination motif from The America Play and uses it in a quasi-naturalistic context. This two-handed family play is centered on the love/hate relationship of two black brothers derisively named Lincoln and Booth by their departed father. Lincoln, homeless since his marriage dissolved, shares his brother's humble digs, and works in an arcade in some unspecified location where, in whiteface, clothed in stovepipe hat, frock coat, false beard, he plays the Lincoln who gets shot. He is doing this because he has gone straight and rejected his former profession as master of the street con called three-card monte, an art his younger brother is striving to learn and keeps practicing as the play progresses. As the brothers reveal their individual needs and reflect on their family history of abandonment, there is a cumulative tension developing. The character portraits of the brothers--the older guarded, evasive, intellectual, fatalistic; the younger needy, infantile, potentially brutal-- makes realistic sense, despite heightened poetic language, which accounts for this play's greater accessibility than its predecessors. But as in all of Parks' works, the allegorical level hovers nearby, and the interplay of characters named Lincoln and Booth resonates inevitably with more than merely psychological dimensions.
    An interesting parallel can be drawn to the symbiotically linked battling brothers in Sam Shepard's True West. Shepard and Parks' siblings evoke different margins of American culture (tacky white exurbia, black ghetto), but each dysfunctional family has a drunken, rejecting father who initiates the brothers' need to find a means of surviving and creating individual identity amidst hostile indifference. Each brother moves to seize part of his sibling's dream (the dream of the freedom of the desert, the dream of the unbeatable 3-card monte game), repossessions that inevitably move towards violence. Indeed, Topdog shares with True West the observation that seeming character reversal reveals a deeper truth: each pair of brothers represents two-sides of one complex sensibility. No myth of Lincoln without Booth; no topdog without an underdog.
    Topdog/Underdog is a fascinating, richly-detailed play whose immense linguistic energy commands attention. It is a play that welcomes complex interpretation. In one regard, however, it is inferior to True West. Parks fails to give us what Shepard provided: a plot catalyst to trigger the dramatic denouement. In True West, drifter Lee's stealing of his brother's movie producer sets Austin off on a wild downward spiral that moves toward confrontation; in Topdog a similar traumatic event involving perceived betrayal is needed to drive the play toward its fatalistic conclusion--but it is not provided. The events that trigger the denouement, such as Booth's being stood up by his would-be girlfriend, or Lincoln's loss of his job, do not arise from the brothers' interactions.
    In the earlier Public Theatre production of Topdog, the brothers were played by Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle, both undeniably excellent. In the Broadway production--in which director George C. Wolfe essentially hews to his effective original staging-- Cheadle has been replaced by the actor/rap artist Mos Def who reveals a subtext of threat beneath his vulnerability that his predecessor lacked. As amusing as he is, Def's Booth carries a hidden explosive charge that may go off at any time, an undeniable attention-grabber. Topdog  is a visceral play that engages deep cultural and political themes but which refuses to provide simplistic answers. "Schemin' and dreamin'" the brothers unite against the third world they are forced to live in because "the man won't let you do" anything else. But there is no agent of "the Man" in this play. The Man is your brother, yourself.

    New York, April 14, 2002                                                      - Gerald Rabkin