Topdog/Underdog

Topdog/underdog (2001), a play by Suzan‐Lori Parks. [ Public Theatre, 145 perf.; Pulitzer Prize.] The two African‐American brothers Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright) and Booth (Don Cheadle), so named as a joke by their parents, have always been rivals. The younger Booth admires and is jealous of his brother, once a three‐card monte hustler but now a freak attraction at a carnival where patrons pay to “shoot” him as he sits dressed as Abraham Lincoln. When Booth tries to imitate Lincoln's monte techniques, tensions mount and Booth ends up shooting his brother for real. Because of some enthusiastic reviews for the lively two‐hander and high praise for Wright's performance, producer George C. Wolfe transferred Topog/Underdog to Broadway's Ambassador Theatre the next year. The African‐American playwright Suzan‐Lori PARKS (b. 1963) was educated at Mount Holyoke College and was first produced in New York in 1989. She has consistently presented new works that explore the black experience, usually in exaggerated allegory form. Her other plays include The America Play (1994), Venus (1996), and two works that use The Scarlet Letter as a reference point for contemporary tales: In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2003).

Suzan-Lori Parks
2001

Like the title suggests, Topdog/Underdog (published in 2001) is a play about competition, reversals, and mirror images that reflect the true self. The idea that became Topdog/Underdog can be found in one of Parks's earlier plays, The America Play (1995), which features a gravedigger named the Foundling Father whose obsession with Abraham Lincoln leads him to find work in a sideshow. Like Link in Topdog/Underdog, the Foundling Father applies whiteface, models several different types of fake beards, and sits in a chair awaiting visitors who pay to assassinate "Abraham Lincoln" with a cap gun. Though the Foundling Father and Link hold the same job, any similarities between these two protagonists end there. Regardless, Parks's fascination with history, especially personal history, and the ways in which illusion can reveal identity makes for riveting drama.

Topdog/Underdog tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, who, abandoned by first one parent and then the other, have had to depend upon each other for survival since they were teenagers. Now in their thirties, the brothers struggle to make a new life, one that will lead them out of poverty. Lincoln, a master of the con game three-card monte, has abandoned a life of crime for a more respectable job impersonating Abraham Lincoln at an arcade. Booth, on the other hand, earns his living as a petty thief, one who wishes to emulate his older brother's success by learning how to "throw the cards." Throughout the play, the brothers compete against each other, vying for control. At any given moment, one may yield power over the other, only to relinquish it in the next. Hence, Topdog/Underdog reveals a topsy-turvy world in which Lincoln and Booth live, a chaotic world that is as dangerous as it is illusory.

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