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Topdog unleashed
Parks’s Pulitzer winner scores twice
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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All the world’s a cage in the production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002 Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog that’s currently up at Trinity Repertory Company. Tony winner Eugene Lee’s set design, which encloses the play’s ramshackle tenement room in a wire enclosure, adds another layer of metaphor to the dramatist’s explosive meditation on African-American male siblings trapped by their "inheritance," from a few bucks and a broken home to the ugly trickle-down of slavery. And in a manner eerily reminiscent of Parks’s Venus, which is about a South African woman put on cruel display in 19th-century Europe for her ample buttocks, the old-fashioned footlights Lee places in the cage make a sort of sideshow attraction of the brothers, with us as the arguably exploitive gawkers. In Kent Gash’s bristling production of the play, a collaboration among Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, Trinity Rep, and Newton’s New Repertory Theatre (where it will open next month), the sad countenance of Abraham Lincoln shines from the stained back wall of the crappy haven shared by the play’s siblings, who were named Lincoln and Booth as a perverse joke by the drunk dad who, following their mother’s example, abandoned them. Here the man on the penny is like the father in The Glass Menagerie, the telephone man who fell in love with long distance but left his framed photograph to light up like Rudolph’s nose whenever his memory is invoked. In Parks’s scatting, grittily poetic œuvre, Honest Abe is an absent figure at least as prominent as Williams’s irresponsible charmer. The Foundling Father of The America Play has the same job as Topdog’s Lincoln: costumed in shabby frock coat and top hat, he impersonates the 16th president in an arcade where patrons pay to reassassinate him with a cap gun. The sparring dynamic of Topdog echoes Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and Sam Shepard’s True West (not to mention the Old Testament), but this grotesque image of a national tragedy re-enacted as a midway game (with a black Lincoln, no less) marks Parks as the true original she is. Lincoln stand-in Lincoln, we learn, was once an accomplished hustler at three-card monte, scoring lucre and ladies with his street-side sleight of hand until one of his compatriots was shot by an irate mark and Linc decided to forsake the game. Now he cleaves to his "sit-down job with benefits" as the bedraggled Lincoln impersonator in whiteface, waiting to be shot at by carnival customers. Younger brother Booth, unemployed, itchy, and revved on macho braggadocio, vilifies his gone-straight, sold-out sibling as a "shiteating motherfucking pathetic limpdick uncle tom" and tries to wheedle Lincoln into imparting to him the lightning moves and seductive patter that made him a card-throwing legend. Topdog, despite its allegorical underpinnings, is more straightforward and less surreal than Parks’s cryptic and imaginative earlier work, including The America Play. What turns out to be a tragicomic fable of fraternity rooted in wounding past and dead-end present is aptly summed up in the play’s title, with ascendancy flipped back and forth between the brothers (neither of whom wields any real power) until their shared anger at abandonment and oppression implodes. The end is less surprising than it might be, given the brothers’ monikers and the terrible burden of testosterone-stoked powerlessness. But Parks’s deployment of agitated, musical language (the beckoning lingo of the three-card-monte dealer is like a cross between jazz and auctioneering) and the play’s mix of exuberant comedy and mounting menace, sibling ribaldry and sibling rivalry, give Topdog a tension that belies its predictability. As with the 2000 Broadway production of True West that starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, this production of Topdog features two sharp actors who alternate in the roles of the brothers. Either combination works, with both Joe Wilson Jr. and Kes Khemnu exerting mastery over Parks’s raw, blues- and jazz-infused language and exuding dangerous energy in the confined space. But seeing them switch roles is an object lesson in theater as a living art, wherein the impression of a script is indeed influenced by performance. In what’s called the "Clubs" cast, the larger Khemnu is a resigned Lincoln figure whose comic attempts to spiff up his arcade performance are oddly touching, but Wilson’s amusingly cocky Booth has a hair-trigger eruptiveness that’s somewhat at odds with the character’s ostensible lesser quickness. The "Diamonds" match-up works better. Wilson’s spry Lincoln is more convincing as the one-time charismatic hustler and Khemnu’s larger, more awkward Booth, still nursing a deep childhood hurt, is more heart-rending, his final leap to violence less expected. But whichever cast you see, there’s no underdog in this cage.
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