There’s the sibling rivalry, and then there’s the brotherly battle between Lincoln and Booth, the fatefully named brothers at the center of Suzan-Lori Parks’ devastating card-trick psychodrama “Topdog/Underdog.” If the playwright, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this deceptively rich play, had called her characters Cain and Abel, she would still have captured the tragic inevitability of the matter. But it would not have the recurring chord of cruel, fundamentally American absurdity that has made this noir hybrid of “Waiting for Godot” and “True West,” released in the summer of 2001, one of the most justly celebrated works of this century. Young, bloody, cruel and absurd century.
Parks had the peculiar genius of imagining a character that encapsulates the contradictions of our unstable republic: a black man who performs dressed in white like his namesake, our sixteenth and most revered president. No, he is not reciting the second inauguration or the Gettysburg Address; he’s letting would-be John Wilkes Booths shoot him with blanks dozens of times each day in what’s described simply as “an arcade,” in one of Parks’s surrealist flourishes.
“It’s an easy job,” Lincoln insists to his little brother, if you can ignore the layers of humiliation he carries with him, including the fact that he fears losing even this terrible job to a wax doll. Booth is not at all willing to overlook these not-so-micro aggressions.
“Topdog/Underdog” is not set in any specific time or place, but its insular story of two deeply isolated brothers and roommates has uncannily predicted the air of menacing unreality that now surrounds our public discourse.
Director Jamil Jude’s confident revival at the Round House Theatre, anchored by lithe and engrossing performances from Ro Boddie and Yao Dogbe as Lincoln and Booth, respectively, harvests every note of humor and pathos from Parks’ immortal script. These siblings were abandoned by their parents at an impressionable age and each received an “inheritance” of $500. His most prized possession is an album of photographs from his less than idyllic childhood, which Booth, in particular, often reminisces about. He even claims to want to emulate his neglectful parents, declaring his ambition to father many offspring and then let them figure things out on their own.
Not that either of them have discovered much. Booth wants Lincoln to return to his old job as a gambler, facing the same gawking rednecks who are now lining up to shoot him for all the money they have in the three-card game. Booth even rehearses Lincoln’s quick delivery and faster chatter (“Look at me now!”) when he’s home alone, and tries to get his brother to address him as “Three Letters.”
Unfortunately, your own sticky fingers are more adept at shoplifting than throwing cards. Despite his childish insistence that a woman named Grace is so stunned by his stolen prosperity that she consented to unprotected sex and demanded that he marry her, Booth is completely confused by the man’s perceived injustice. weaker sex As for Lincoln, his wife left him years ago and then briefly sought solace in Booth’s bed.
These two brothers have had a bad time.
The despair they both try to keep at bay is so pervasive and oppressive that Jude, Boddie and Dogbe must extract every grain of levity just to prevent the undertaking from becoming too depressing to bear. One of these jokes comes early, when Dogbe performs a kind of variation on a clown car in a striptease, somehow producing an entire stolen wardrobe under his oversized parka: not only two complete suits, but two pairs of shoes. dress. “I stole, and I stole handsomely,” he gloats. (The costume designer has dressed Dogbe’s Booth in an old Washington Bullets jersey, a welcome local touch.)
Throughout the long evening, the light from a neon sign (one we can’t quite read) suspended outside the window of Meghan Raham’s appropriately dingy set bathes the brothers’ barren home in a hellish crimson hue. The subtextual question behind each stanza of Parks’ lacerating dialogue is: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We already know the answer, but it hits with the force of a bullet anyway.
The best/least favored, through June 23 at Round House Theatre. Approximately 2 and a half hours, including an intermission. roundhousetheatre.org.
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