Review Brothers bite hard in powerhouse Topdog Underdog on Broadway HEAD TOPICS

Review Brothers bite hard in powerhouse Topdog Underdog on Broadway

10/21/2022 6:35:00 PM

Suzan-Lori Parks play is a phenomenal two-brother drama as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century

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Chicago Tribune

Chris Jones writes: 'Suzan-Lori Parks’ 'Topdog/Underdog' is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century.' Suzan-Lori Parks play is a phenomenal two-brother drama as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century ExpandCorey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks' play"Topdog/Underdog" at the John Golden Theatre in New York.(Marc J. Franklin / HANDOUT)NEW YORK — Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century. And on Broadway, the director Kenny Leon has put this 2001 masterpiece back on a fresh, vital pedestal. Read more:
Chicago Tribune » “Topdog/Underdog,” Back on Broadway, Still Has Its Eye on the American Long Con Review: In ‘Topdog/Underdog,’ Staying Alive Is the Ultimate Hustle ‘Topdog/Underdog’ Is the Sharpest Show on Broadway ‘Topdog/Underdog’ Broadway Review: Corey Hawkins & Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Deal A Winner

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CNN News, delivered. Select from our newsletters below and enter your email to subscribe. Read more >> “Topdog/Underdog,” Back on Broadway, Still Has Its Eye on the American Long ConExpectations are high for the Broadway revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan-Lori Parks’s tour de force. Review: In ‘Topdog/Underdog,’ Staying Alive Is the Ultimate HustleA latter-day Lincoln and Booth try to survive the American dream in a hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival of the Suzan-Lori Parks play. ‘Topdog/Underdog’ Is the Sharpest Show on BroadwayCorey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen give superlative performances in “Topdog/Underdog”—the standout of this current Broadway season so far: energetic, witty, mischievous, searing, tender, and vulnerable. ‘Topdog/Underdog’ Broadway Review: Corey Hawkins & Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Deal A WinnerTwenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog has lost none of its vitality and power and cu… Lori Harvey Turns Heads in a Sheer Illusion Catsuit and Stiletto HeelsLori Harvey attended the launch of designer LaQuan Smith's collection for Cash By Cash App in NYC wearing a sheer catsuit and leather bomber jacket. Lightfoot, Federal Officials in Talks Over Environmental Racism ProbeMayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is negotiating with President Joe Biden’s housing officials over potential city reforms after federal investigators accused Chicago of environmental racist zoning and land-use practices. Environmental racism? Everything is racist Itd scam mayor makes money illegal found Oct 21, 2022 at 9:00 pm Expand Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks' play"Topdog/Underdog" at the John Golden Theatre in New York.: In a whisper.Topdog/Underdog NYT Critic's Pick 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.—and their expectations of audiences’ posterior comfort and attention spans—are so scattered these days. (Marc J. Franklin / HANDOUT) NEW YORK — Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century. B : Whatd he say this time? L incoln : “Does thuh show stop when no ones watching or does thuh show go on?” In case you were wondering if these doomed brothers are in the world of allegory, Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design includes a sepia-toned American-flag curtain that lifts to show us Booth’s crummy room, its single bed, and the red recliner where Lincoln sleeps. And on Broadway, the director Kenny Leon has put this 2001 masterpiece back on a fresh, vital pedestal. Her skittering silverfish of a play, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, glints with meaning that refuses to stay put. The experience at the Golden Theatre as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins smash each other into psychological pieces is at once retro and prescient. When the flag curtain rises, the room rotates slightly toward us, as though it were just finishing a turn on a pedestal. When you can pull yourself out of the narrative action, which is not easy to do here, you realize that Parks was anticipating all kinds of stuff that was about to happen in America. This is the 20th-anniversary production of Topdog/Underdog . Advertisement I’ve seen “Topdog/Underdog” many times before, including, some 15 years ago, a fabulously daring Chicago pairing with Shepard’s similar “True West” wherein a pair of white actors swapped roles, night-by-night, with a pair of Black actors. When it comes to what’s in that room, though, Leon keeps the metaphor stuff tidied away. (“I stole and I stole generously,” he crows. There’s something few would have the guts to do now, even though Parks’ characters do not have to be race-specific, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has said several times. But what makes Leon’s new staging notable is how he resists the temptation to bog down his production with the symbolism of Abraham Lincoln mythology, and any other such arcane academia, and focuses instead on making sure we believe that these vulnerable brothers truly exist, right there in the here and now of the United States of America, as Parks describes her physical and temporal settings. Allen Lee Hughes has his lights rise and fall on the men (it is always night, but when, say, Lincoln sings, he gets a spot), yet he doesn’t go stark and expressionistic with them, the way Scott Zielinski did twenty years ago. Leon threads a clever needle there: the visual and aural impact of Arnulfo Maldonado’s plushly bordered setting and Justin Ellington’s fused sound design are rooted in the play’s millennial era. Rejecting fixed meanings, as well as the limitations and clichés of correctness, she generates themes that her play will not so much corral as set free. But nothing here feels old. The play is bleakly funny, but Leon makes sure that it’s funny funny, true to the moment, up to the minute. Yet they remain yoked together, unable to separate, unable to bid farewell. Advertisement The symbolism here often tempts directors of this work to move in the wrong direction. One brother, played by Hawkins, is named Lincoln and he has a job where he paints his face, attaches a hat and beard and impersonates the iconic president in a live-action arcade shooting game: his Abe pretends to watch a play while tourists pretend to shoot him. Leon’s transitions are hasty and a little awkward, and he misses the way the show should invoke—especially in its final moments—an unseen force, some demonic mill somewhere, grinding away at fate. The endlessly sorrowful loop of American violence. There is, though, the specter of a kind of pre-digital downsizing: Lincoln worries that his employer might replace him with a dummy Lincoln that does not require an hourly wage. Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks' play"Topdog/Underdog" at the John Golden Theatre in New York. Much of what the two men say about what’s happening in the rest of their lives is unreliable, based in fantasy or in lies. (Marc J. Like three-card monte, or jazz, the play — and, at its best, Kenny Leon’s direction of it — moves too fast for analysis. As well as painful memories of times past, and a determination to surmount them and the racism of the world outside these doors, there is a jockeying for position going on—who can be successful, who will find love (Lincoln has left his wife, Booth has fallen for a woman named Grace), who is up on their luck, and who will be fatefully down on his. Franklin / HANDOUT) Booth (Abdul-Mateen II), meanwhile, is Lincoln’s younger brother, at once festering with rage from the pair’s dysfunctional parents, who have abandoned their progeny with such a lack of resources that their entire lives have been street hustles in order to survive. (I can believe it. Their father thought it would be funny to name the two boys this way before walking out the door; the boys’ subsequent lives were not exactly filled with laughs, America requiring two young Black men to always be on the lookout for the nation’s big con. The emotional oomph in this play comes from the brothers’ desperate attempts to find normalcy: to hold down a job, to put on a romantic show for a girl who never arrives, to find a way to care for each other, even though they were taught from birth that familial affection is as phony as the antics of a Three Card Monte shark on the streets of New York.) Whether Leon explores it or not, there’s a clear intimation that we’re seeing something more than the ruin of one small family. Parks certainly plays her hand slyly. Their shared experience means they can’t quit each other, but they also have one main locus for their frustration. And thus you’re kept on a knife edge, pulling for both brothers to make it though the show. Under that big, puffy coat, there is a pair of mirrors for all of us. Lincoln and Booth both know the irony of a Black man dressing up as the “Great Emancipator” in the service of breadline work today. Parks makes it abundantly clear that we are indeed watching a presentation, but we still stay terrified that the decks are so stacked against these Americans that the fate of their historical predecessors awaits them both. And the circumstances of their youth (their parents bolted) form a rain cloud over them long before the thunder arrives. Both of these actors show you all of that, shifting, sharply and painfully, with the moods of their characters, fighting with each other for happiness without realizing their fates are as intertwined as with a presidential assassin and his victim. Published in the print edition of the , issue, with the headline “Confidence Game. The play makes a gigantic shift toward crisis in Act 2 and, at the performance I saw, Abdul-Mateen didn’t fully chart the magnitude of that change. But that’s a minor criticism of a beautifully vulnerable performance that seems totally to understand what it feels like to be a younger brother. Hawkins, a Tony nominee in 2017 for “Six Degrees of Separation” and a star of the recent “In the Heights” film, gives an astonishing verbal and physical performance, creating a character whose thoughts aren’t posted on placards but expressed in the spin he puts on his words and the way he weaves his fingers. And Hawkins is nothing short of spectacular: he shows us a vessel that seems assured, self-contained and pragmatic, but actually has wounds as deep as those of a nation. If he is relatively plodding at cards, Booth excels at shoplifting—and we watch him dress, piece by piece, in that day’s swiped clothing. All in all, this is really a show about how much we all need love, and to be loved. By our family, our friends and our country. (Lincoln uses the song to soothe himself but also to blackmail his brother emotionally. Advertisement .