Topdog/underdog ( Archived )

Reviews

Pictured (L to R): Mos Def, Jeffrey Wright.

Photography by Michal Daniel

The shadow of Abraham Lincoln complete with stovepipe hat looms both visually and metaphorically over a play where two brothers cohabit in a seedy flat filled with pornographic magazines, stolen possessions, and resentment. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning script spirals from high comedy to tragedy, as it traces the optimism of two black men trying to forget a past where they have been witnesses to their parentssexual exploits, and eventually abandoned.

This may sound like an evening pitched at the liberal conscience rather than the funny-bone, but George C. Wolfe’s production is animated by two performances so rich in physical as well as verbal humour that initially the piece feels like a comic double act, where frustration is channelled into high entertainment . Against Riccardo Hernandez’s moudily atmospheric boarding-house set, Mos Def, the rapper-turned-actor, plays the hyperactive Booth, whose obsession with card games and his eternally absent girlfriend Grace contrasts with the existence of Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright), who paints his white face in order to appear as his presidential namesake in an arcade, where businessmen, youths and bored housewives line up to shoot blanks at him.

President Lincoln may have made major moves to liberate black people from slavery in the 1860s, but here he symbolises the brothers’ imprisonment and Wright who won a Tony Award for his appearance in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America potently conveys the emasculation inherent in his dressing up as an assassinated white politician. Cruelly named by his father after Lincoln’s rascist assassin, his brother Booth’s effervescent escapism becomes increasingly desperate, and Mos Def comic’s portrayal goes from funny-boned fantasy to angry despair.

The deceptively entertaining tone masks a sustained questioning of whether these black men can ever escape either their own or America history. A richly multi-layered delight.

Rachel Halliburton, EVENING STANDARD, 12 August 2003

Famous names may have given Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play its hype, but Topdog/Underdog is much more than a star vehicle.

In director George C. Wolfe’s hands, and with the tremendous acting talents of Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright, it’s a funny, moving, thought-provoking, electrifying event.

Lincoln (Wright) is a former three-card mote hustler who has gone straight: he now whites up to play Abe Lincoln in a disturbing arcade game, where punters pay to play John Wilkes Booth and shoot him (every pun intended).

His kid brother Booth (their father named them as a joke) spends his days shoplifting and poring over porn mags, dreaming of mastering the three-card monte, getting rich and winning the heart of Grace.

The pair share a dingy boarding-house room, made brilliantly seedy by designer Riccardo Hernandez, and their intense love/hate relationships fuels comedy and tragedy in equal measure.

Wright is outstanding as Lincoln, lost in an alcoholic haze as he contemplates the detritus of his life. With help from Scott Zielinski’s lighting techniques, he appears genuinely sinister as he jumps around in tailcoat and stove-pipe hat. Mos Def is equally impressive as Booth, obviously damaged by their traumatic childhood and flashing between high and low moods in the blink of an eye.

The pair’s comic timing is impeccable and the chemistry between them is so engaging it quite easy to believe they are brothers. Parks’s play works on many levels, but it is perhaps at this most basic level of sibling rivalry and damaged love that it is most afffecting.

Siobhan Murphy, METRO LIFE, 13 August 2003

There a moment towards the end of Suzan-Lori Parks’s two-hander where Lincoln, reformed hustler and brother of Booth, recants and begins to shuffle a game of Three Card Monte. As he does so, a crash of thunder comes from outside.

It’s an unabashed tilt at cosmic significance that seems at odds with what goes before. Until then this play is all clowning and banter, the two protagonists almost serving as a comic double act. Mos Def Booth is wiry and full expression. Jeffrey Wright Lincoln is a bulky, sardonic presence, his face seemingly half-anaesthetised. Both are brilliant.

Lincoln makes their money in an arcade, pretending to be Abe Lincoln so customers can pretend to shoot him. Booth wants him to go back to hustling.

Their situation is original and their speech is quick and rhythmically surprising. Parks’s dialogue is funny and distinctive and black.

But the peal of thunder is no bluff, as it paves the way for a second act as tragically fulfilling as the first is edgy and hilarious.

It turns out that this is a play about winners and losers. The inevitable victory of the dealer in Three Card Monte is a paradigm for a world in which the loser is always predetermined, as with Lincoln and his minor capitalist boss, as with skint Booth and his aspirant ex-girlfriend.

The brothers’ relationship, too, has this quality: drunken Lincoln wielding an unspoken superiority over his jealous, mouthy brother.

Allied to this is an intangible sense of a guiding fortune, that irreversible occasions of chance have fixed their relative roles. Can Booth’s underdog status be traced to his skipping school on a particular day? Or was the brothers’ relationships sealed with the names their father jokingly gave them?

Though the substance thickens, this production never loses the dance and swagger of its first half, and between the bickering, before the death, Parks even gives us a glimpse of sweet fraternal love. This is a great play, well worthy of its Pulitzer prize, and it’s a pleasure to know that the casting of hip-hop star Mos Def should ensure it’s seen by more than the usual crowd.

Kieron Quirke, FINANCIAL TIMES, 13 August 2003

“Watch me close,” say the fast-fingered con artists of Suzan-Lori Parks Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander. “Watch me close now.”

It’s hard not to in George C. Wolfe Broadway production, now transferred to the Royal Court, when the interplay is as enthralling as this.

Mos Def, the rapper turned movie actor (Brown Sugar, The Italian Job), brings a sweet neediness to the shoplifting Booth, who believes that a better life awaits if only his older introspective brother Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright) will teach him his card-hustling skills. But Lincoln has gone straight, earning less than a white man and under threat from a wax dummy to lose his livelihood as a white-face impersonator at an arcade, where customers can shoot the President like his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

The brothers live in Booth’s grungy tenement room all peeling walls, scrounged furnishings, bare bulbs and haunted-house shadows. They drink, banter, argue and brag about women. They reminisce about their childhood and wonder why their parents abandoned them. Betrayed at an early age, these siblings find it hard to trust anyone, even each other.

Wolfe brings an almost vaudevillian physicality to the fraternal friction. A battle of wills about who will lay the table for dinner is all stares and shrugs. In a funky striptease to James Brown, Def sheds the shoplifted suits. The way that Wright, introduced to Broadway by Wolfe in Angels in America before Hollywood found the actor for Basquiat and Ali, impersonates Abe Lincoln getting shot is funny and disturbing.

The actors convey a shared lifetime of family hurt, a bond of closeness and rivalry, support and jealousy. Def shows how Booth is still a child unable to control his feelings. Wright, in the more complex role of Lincoln, delivers a multilayered portrait of a man caught between his troubled past and his aspirations.

They are also wonderfully in tune with Parks’s writing, a mixture of extended monologues and poeticised street slang that makes for an entertaining if languid first act. But the second proves less enthralling as the brothersambivalent relationship gives way to more naked confrontations. There is also little to justify Booth sudden boiling temper after the generally amiable first half. The ending suggests that the brothers, destined to re-enact their namesakes’ roles, are prisoners of a historical as well as personal past, but it doesn seem earned by what gone before.

Still, this is a vibrant, gritty, lyrical play full of striking moments with the performances to match. Catch this cast while you can.

Ian Johns, THE TIMES, 13 August 2003

It’s easy to forget the effect a theatre can have on a play. When Topdog/Underdog was performed on Broadway last year, it was in a huge space that swamped Suzan-Lori Parks two-hander, making its flaws clunky plotting and static, verbose dialogue glaringly obvious. It didn’t help that rapper Mos Def, playing Booth, muttered his way through the part. It is exactly the same production now playing at the Royal Court but somehow, in this intimate room, Topdog/Underdog feels taut, involving and strange.

Perhaps the change is mostly due to Mos Def himself. Radiating confidence, his words startingly clear, he has developed a powerful stage presence. Where he was once over-shadowed by Jeffrey Wright, formidable as Booth older brother Lincoln, the two performances are now more balanced which is crucial if Parks’s vision of an intense sibling rivalry is going to make any dramatic sense.

Of course, improved acting and a sympathetic space can eradicate a play problems. Parks has created two engaging characters in Lincoln, and ex-card shark employed by an amusement arcade to re-enact Abraham Lincoln death, and his brother Booth (named, for a joke, after Lincoln assassin), an accomplished thief. The trouble is, she explains their unstable personalities with a textbook warped-family background that is simply too contrived. The brothers’ relationship driven by jealousy, ricocheting from fiery rows to affectionate complicity is utterly convincing as long as they are playing cards or arguing about pornography. The moment they start reminiscing about their childhood, truth drains from the play.

It doesn’t help that Parks has a tendency to overwrite, producing lengthy passages of self-conscious poetic imagery that slow the action to a halt; nor that the director, George C. Wolfe, takes this as an excuse to periodically shunt the production towards melodrama. Using stark lighting to bolster already heightened emotions, Wolfe creates some striking stage images. And yet, Topdog/Underdog’s real strength is its naturalistic relish in the cut-and-thrust banter of two men locked in competition. The production is at its best when it is most relaxed: when Mos Def and Wright dress up in stolen suits, sort out the bills, taunt each other shortcomings and generally act like brothers do.

Maddy Costa, THE GUARDIAN, 13 August 2003

Before Mayor Giuliani cleaned the place up, fast-talking card-sharps were a regular part of the New York street scene, throwing down the deuces with dazzling speed and dexterity. I was fascinated by them but never dared watch too long in case I was sucked into the game and lost the shirt off my back.

However, the American writer Suzan-Lori Parks has the fortune to be married to a blues musician who knows the scan intimately, and three card-monte (better known as Find the Lady on this country) provides the dramatic and thematic heart of her Pulitzer-Prize-winning play.

It’s a tremendous piece exhilarating, funny but also devastatingly sad, presenting a vivid microcosm of both family relationships and the black experience in America today.

This is a story of two black brothers who have been whimsically named Lincoln and Booth by their parents. Lincoln was once the top dog, Link the Stink, a formidable card hustler who could deprive people of their life savings on the strength of his spiel and a few magical hand movements. In the show’s vivid vernacular he had “thuh moves and the grooves, thuh talk and the walk, thuh flap and the the rap.”

But Lincoln tired of hustling, especially after his sidekick was shot dead, and he now earns his living as his celebrated namesake, sitting in a fairground booth in a false beard, stovepipe hat and white-face make-up; punters come in to shoot him with blanks. It’s a wonderfully rich and haunting image of the corruption of the American dream. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out because of his drinking, and he’s sleeping on a reclining chair in his brother cheerless New York bedsit. Booth seems to live largely by shoplifting , but he remains an impressible optimist, determined to mend his rift with his girlfriend and persuade his brother to teach him the secrets of three-card monte so that he can earn a living and become top-dog himself.

It’s often hard to believe that a woman wrote this play, so fully does Parks understand the male psyche and fraternal relationships. Her dialogue is like a black version of David Mamet, fast, edgy, wry and sometimes obscene. She develops the brothersback-story with great skill, gradually laying bare a heart-breaking story of abandonment, before speeding the action up to its devastating if not entirely unpredictable crisis.

George C. Wolfe’s production, first staged at the Public Theater in New York, is blessed with two superb performances from Jeffrey Wright as Lincoln and the hip-hop star Mos Def as his brother. They play together with a mixture of exasperation, tenderness and sheer charisma that has you on the edge of your seat, brilliantly suggesting the power struggles and resentments that lie at the heart of the so many sibling relationships. It becomes chillingly clear in these performances that hustling and confidence trickery have played a corrosive part in their family life, as well as being a means of turning a buck on the streets.

Jeffrey Wright’s Lincoln has a lovely melancholic dignity. He looks both hilarious and sad in his presidential costume, and takes a real pride in what many would see as a demeaning job. But his character is exuberantly transformed when he rediscovers his card-sharping skills, and his three-card monte routines are played out with mesmeric skill.

Mos Def, refuting the rule that pop stars can act, is every bit as good as Lincoln relentlessly cheerful in spite of his dire circumstances, wonderfully funny, and emotionally devastating in the play desperate closing moments when his abandoned howls raise the hairs on the back of the neck.

Electrifying.

Charles Spencer, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 12 August 2003