Two Black brothers. One cramped room. A lifetime of love, rivalry, abandonment and unspoken hurt. That volatile mix lies at the heart of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, now playing at The Old Globe Theatre. In the nimble hands of director Steve H. Broadnax III, we see beyond the inevitability of tragedy: two brothers desperately trying to hold onto each other.
Even before the action begins, music sets the mood. The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” a hip-hop mix, and Muddy Waters’ defiant “Mannish Boy” establish a world of Black masculinity, struggle and survival.
At the center are Lincoln (Alano Miller) and Booth (Elijah Jones), brothers burdened with names their father gave them as a joke, names that hang ominously over everything that follows.
Booth’s cramped apartment tells its own story: the unmade bed, worn chair, milk-crate table and cinder-block shelving. The intimate theater-in-the-round staging brings the audience inside that room, witnesses to the brothers’ jokes, arguments, memories and wounds.
Jones’ Booth is restless energy. He talks incessantly, boasts about girlfriend Grace and dreams of becoming a three-card monte hustler. He returns from one “hard day’s work,” his coat stuffed with boosted clothes, proudly declaring, “I stole generously.”
Miller’s Lincoln is his counterweight, controlled, methodical and seemingly determined to stay on the straight path. A former three-card monte master, he now earns an “honest” living at an arcade impersonating Abraham Lincoln, complete in whiteface with frock coat, beard and stovepipe hat, while customers pretend to assassinate him.
The absurdity provides some of the evening’s biggest laughs. In one particularly hilarious sequence, the brothers rehearse an assassination. But Parks never allows the laughter to erase the pain underneath.
Lincoln carefully folds his costume, placing it in a battered trunk. Booth calls him an Uncle Tom for wearing it. Hovering over both is the memory of parents who abandoned them.
Once, Booth remembers, it was “you and me against the world.” That longing to recover the bond they once shared gives Broadnax’s production its emotional force. Both actors handle Parks’ extended monologues with depth, humor and emotional agility.
When Lincoln finally demonstrates three-card monte for Booth, Miller’s performance takes on an almost spiritual quality. His hands, voice and body fall back into the rhythms of the hustler he has tried to leave behind.
“Watch me close,” he says, a continuing refrain and underlying cadenced prophecy.
We watch the cards, watch the brothers, watch who is dealer and who is mark. We watch how quickly winning becomes losing and love becomes rivalry.
Parks never lets us forget the terrible joke embedded in the brothers’ names. But the actors make Lincoln and Booth so fully human that history recedes, leaving us absorbed instead in the fragile bond between them. Beneath the hustling, joking, boasting and playing the dozens are two abandoned boys who grew into men without ever fully escaping that abandonment.
For all its humor, Topdog/Underdog reveals how wounds carried forward can become weapons turned against the people we love most. Its tragedy is that somewhere along the way, two brothers who once believed in each other begin playing the game against each other.
The performance gives us plenty to watch: two gifted actors moving between comedy and anguish, a director skilled in letting silences and laughter coexist, and two Black men whose swagger often disguises how deeply they have been hurt.
Topdog/Underdog runs through October 18. Black theater patrons are invited to the October 9 Old Globe-sponsored Black Theatre Night, featuring a pre-show mixer and the opportunity to experience the play together in community. For ticket information, visit www.theoldglobe.org.
