Topdog/Underdog tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, who, abandoned by their parents, have had to depend upon each other for survival since they were teenagers. Now in their 30s, 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 wield 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.
Know's Topdog/Underdog is a powerful story of sibling rivalry
BY Rick Pender - Citybeat
You're probably not off to a good start in life as a pair of African-American brothers if your drunk of a father decides to name you Lincoln and Booth. Jokes like that have a way of fulfilling themselves, and that's pretty much what Topdog/Underdog is about. Know Theatre of Cincinnati is presenting the show's local premier of Suzan-Lori Parks' 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner.
Lincoln (Derek Snow) is the older brother, the "topdog." After several years of streetside chicanery with cards, bilking people out of their money and watching one of his friends get killed, he's gone more legit. He's found a job in a shooting arcade where people can pay to shoot famous personages -- of course, he portrays Lincoln. Dressed in a stovepipe hat, a scraggly beard and a long waistcoat, he knows it's a dead-end and he sees he's likely to be replaced by a "wax dummy." Still he values the work: It's a "sit-down job with benefits."
Of course, his life is far from presidential: His wife has left him, and he's been forced to move in with Booth (Todd Patterson), five years his junior, the "underdog," who gets what he needs by shoplifting. Somehow he's obtained an apartment, largely to impress women, but he needs Lincoln's weekly salary to make ends meet.
It's a kind of marriage of convenience as, once again, the duo find themselves in a symbiotic relationship, not unlike the existence they endured when they were being raised by their dissolute parents who slowly abandoned them.
Booth has simple and uniformed notions of how to get ahead in life. He wants to change his name to "3-Card" and learn the tricks that had made Lincoln a success in days gone by. The seesaw of power between the two -- the constantly teetering balance between the "topdog" and the "underdog" -- is the engine that drives this play toward its tragically inevitable conclusion. But it's the vibrancy and truth of their relationship that makes Topdog/Underdog watchable.
Parks has written a kind of street vernacular the brothers use when they speak that rings true, yet is full of poetry and humor -- and is easy to hear and understand. Despite the brothers' ongoing rivalry, there is also love and care, a kind of jocular teasing and mutual encouragement natural to siblings. Booth boosts a new suit and all the trimmings to impress his woman, but snags another outfit for Lincoln. When a weary Lincoln falls asleep, Booth covers him with a threadbare blanket. But old habits die hard, and new behaviors are hard to shake: Their conflict brings this powerful play to a shocking conclusion.
Snow has a deliberate demeanor that works well for Lincoln, a man whose maturity is beginning to become evident despite his tough circumstances. He resists returning to street hustling, even though the jobs he finds are often far from satisfying. Patterson has the energy of the hustle -- "I been schemin' and dreamin'," he tells Lincoln -- but director Richard Hess keeps him reined in enough to let us see that he's vulnerable and less than likely to succeed. Hess, who heads the drama program at UC's College-Conservatory of Music, sustains the right pace for this two-man show: The brothers' scenes crackle with energy, and their monologues give us insight into their heart of hearts, two insecure men who aspire for more but can't seem to find the path that will enable them to shed their ironic roles.
Parks' script plays in about two hours (including a 10-minute intermission), but it seems to fly, even though there's a minimum to what two characters can do in a cluttered, one-room apartment. Andrew Hungerford's set is surrounded by a perimeter of empty liquor and wine bottles, one more sign of how constricted the brothers' lives have become. The seedy, disintegrating furniture and the milk crates Booth stacks up to make a card-playing table provide all the scenery that's needed; Hungerford's lighting design (which is, in truth, a tad too dark and patchy) generally evokes the changeable, menacing moods required from scene to scene.
But what you'll carry away from Topdog/Underdog is a sense of awe at the writing skill of Suzan-Lori Parks. The playwright has created two men with skin and bones and a lot of flaws. Their mouths work double-time; the words they employ and the acts they describe are not always easy to hear. But Lincoln and Booth are supremely human, and that's what makes this production worth watching.
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'Topdog/Underdog' intrigues
Theater review
BY JACKIE DEMALINE |
Suzan-Lori Parks’ intriguing "Topdog/Underdog," about African-American brothers Lincoln and Booth playing games of one-upsmanship in the beat-to-crap room they share, has finally found its way to a Cincinnati stage, with a regional premiere at Know Theatre.
We don’t see much of Parks’ work here, and “Topdog,” which won the 2002 Pulitzer, is arguably her best and certainly her most readily accessible work. A solid production at Know gives you a basic introduction.
Parks is at her best when she’s playing with history and myth, and when she’s writing dialogue that is a sort of urban street poetry that nevertheless sounds natural as voiced by her characters.
The history and myth: Well, you have African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Lincoln (Derek Snow) enters the play wearing a stovepipe hat, an Honest Abe costume and fake beard and he’s in white face. He has a job at an arcade where he spends the day being “assassinated.”
Issues of America’s history with race move front and center.
Booth (Todd Patterson) is good at stealing and not much else, including romance and realizing his dream of being a master of street corner three-card monte, where the real money is. Lincoln is a past master, but has long since gone straight.
Edgy “Topdog” is a Know kind of show, but it’s still what the company aspires to rather than what it can completely successfully deliver, although it’s Know’s best effort in more than a year.
The production benefits enormously from the abilities of director Richard Hess, chair of the College-Conservatory of Music drama department, making his Know debut. Hess knows what to do with pace, with blocking and with making the most of design elements.
The production’s primary problem is that Patterson and Snow don’t nail down the play’s underlying menace. From the first moments there has to be something in the air that’s so subtle you can’t quite put your finger on what’s off, you just have the disquieting sense that something is.
Patterson has energy to burn as Booth, but the character comes across as nothing much more than young and immature. Snow gets Lincoln’s defeatist been-down-so-long-looks-like-up-to-me dimension. A lot of the back-and-forth is funny, and they have the rhythms down.
But there’s plenty more simmering in both these characters, and the actors have to tantalize us in every moment, not just in their big, sweeping monologues.
They have to pull us into Park’s game of three-card, the same way Lincoln and Booth set up a mark. We think we get it, we’re sure we get it – but we don’t.
The stakes don’t get higher than they are in “Topdog/Underdog,” with issues of family, abandonment, education, deprivation, and, of course, race all coming into play.
It doesn’t need to be talked about; it just needs to be in the actors’ bones, everything that has brought these two characters to this moment in time. And that’s what the audience should be getting hints of from the first, building and building until the brothers finally put real money down on the table in a final challenge as the drama peaks.
“Topdog” is a play that has to be electrifying to be what it’s meant to be – a tall order for a small theater. The Know production generates enough sparks and an occasional lightning bolt to make it worth your time.
“Topdog/Underdog,” in rep through March Feb. 23, Know Theatre, 1120 Jackson St., Over-the-Rhine. 513-300-5669 and www.knowtheatre.com.