Review: In ‘Topdog/Underdog,’ Staying Alive Is the Ultimate Hustle

Among the most thrilling and jarring gambits in modern theater, up there with the nattering woman half-buried in sand at the top of Beckett’s “Happy Days,” is the scene that opens Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” with a bang. In a seedy rooming house apartment, as one man rehearses his three-card monte spiel — “watch me close, watch me close now” — Abraham Lincoln arrives with Chinese takeout.

But watch Parks, too. Her skittering silverfish of a play, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, glints with meaning that refuses to stay put. Though this Lincoln, like the one he’s named for, wears the requisite frock coat and stovepipe hat, we see at once that he’s a Black man in whiteface, and soon learn that he earns $314 a week for letting customers at an arcade pretend to shoot him. The spieler is his brother, Booth, whose vocation seems to be shoplifting. (“I stole and I stole generously,” he crows.) They are bonded by familiarity, mistrust and, as their names suggest, a history beyond their own.

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