It’s a testament to the power of Susan Laurie Parks’ imagination and cognitive power that “Topdog/Underdog” feels as vibrant and electric today as it did 20 years ago. The first Broadway revival, which opened at the Golden Theater tonight, billows like a live wire – an American tale with a finger pushed into a jack. Participate in the high professional performances of Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a theatrical event in the basic sense, because it requires watching here and now.
The 2001 play, in which Parks became the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, has achieved a high profile in American messages over the past two decades, inspiring a generation of playwrights grappling with race, capitalism, and their blood. Roots in the history of our country. It’s also loose-ended, funny, and magnetically entertaining, and is a slow-burning show of dramatic fireworks. On the page, Parks is known for her liberal, almost sculptural, use of blank space. Under the direction of Kenny Lyon, this production fills them with bravado and heart.
It’s easy to read the two brothers, named Lincoln and Booth, in a stinging joke by parents who abandoned them, as token lists. They share cramped quarters in a dwelling house, where rivalry and dependence on each other bounce off the walls. The younger Booth, a planner and dreamer, a shoplifting expert and an unlucky womanizer who embodies the bustle – a strategy to survive the system by manipulating it. Lincoln mastered this route, but abandoned it after the murder of one of his friends. Now, he’s doing the “honest work” of dressing in white like the Great Liberator, in an arcade where he’s practicing his own death for happy shepherds. “It’s a living,” Lincoln says. Booth replies, “But you’re not alive,” to which Lincoln replies, “I’m alive, right?”
They are also men of appetite, pride and perseverance presented with distinctive detail. When Lincoln calls out on the sticky pages of Booth’s collection of pornography, the younger replies, “If I didn’t take care of myself, I’d be right there running there ‘spending money he doesn’t have and shooting people’ out of a need for unresolved sexual release,” and along with That – it worked with Lincoln’s ex-husband after she dumped him because he couldn’t have it (!). The spouses strike each other, go into the jugular and retreat in a capillary rhythm filled with bitterness shared only among relatives.
Both stars show grace and subtlety that hides under their natural ease. Every moment is totally compelling. Hawkins, a Tony nominee for Six Degrees of Secession, wears Lincoln’s turbulent resignation like the moldy frock coat in which he mummified his assassination. It’s a wonderful turn that fuses the obvious contradictions of the character into a man of principles and a completely believable deceit. Abdul-Mateen II, who broke out in his Emmy-winning role on HBO’s Watchmen, made his unusual debut on Broadway, sparking courage and resentment against Booth’s hopeful delusion. It is a pleasure to witness the expert sparring and conflict between the two, and it may even lull the audience into a false sense of relief. Brothers can go on like this forever, right?
The play’s subtleties of visions — about history (which people love to see “unfold the way they folded it”), desire, legacy and more — have only become sharper over time. They benefit from the lively and wonderful presentation of the Lyon Theater. Gold ornate curtains retract in sills around the dingy bedroom where the brothers crowd, suggesting a broader, more luxurious context (the collection was designed by Arnulfo Maldonado). The production looks at once like an immortal pageant and peek-a-boo through its stained window.
There’s an underside to tease the long-awaited revival of “Topdog/Underdog” that seems to be crucially connected to the moment. It is true that little has changed about the system that degrades black men, requiring clamor and consumption even as it consumes everyone in its path. It is also true that the play extracts far more from how people are shaped by social forces, as it hides in what makes them tick. It’s a time bomb that will always be ready to explode.
[ad_2]
