Onstage: Review: Topdog/Underdog

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.

Critic’s Pick

This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2008.