Theatre in Review: Topdog/Underdog (Golden Theatre)

	Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Sometimes in a Broadway theatre, one experiences a kind of pentimento effect, glimpsing traces of productions that previously occupied the same stage. At the Golden Theatre, while taking in the superb teamwork of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins in Topdog/Underdog I saw brief, yet unmistakable, flickers of both Waiting for Godot and, surprisingly The Gin Game. It's doubtful that Suzan-Lori Parks had either play in mind when writing her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner. (Well, maybe Beckett's modernist masterpiece, just a little.) Yet nothing in the theatre exists in a vacuum and sometimes the ghosts of dramas past can't help making their presence known.

Godot came to mind because Topdog's only characters, Booth and Lincoln -- the names were their father's idea of a joke -- inhabit a world that is both naturalistic and an existential limbo. Taking place, according to the program, here and now, the script nevertheless alludes to an earlier New York of street hustles and SRO hotels. Other details also indicate a stylized approach: Lincoln works in an arcade shooting gallery where, dressed as his namesake (complete with whiteface), he gets picked off for a living -- a gig that's a stretch even for the city's bad old days. There are further hints in the design: Arnulfo Maldonado's set, a grimy, beige purgatory furnished with Goodwill rejects, is surrounded by swanky Austrian curtains.

These and other clues suggest that, inside this rattletrap universe, Booth and Lincoln are standing in for generations of Black men who, disinherited, bereft of opportunity, and pushed to society's margins, are working any available angle to get ahead, unable to admit they're trapped in a mug's game. Which brings us to The Gin Game; like Topdog/Underdog, D. L. Coburn's play features two characters dealing out their histories of need and betrayal over the card table. Lincoln, who has been thrown out by his wife, is crashing in Booth's room, tolerated mostly for his paycheck. Yet Booth, desperate to win back his girlfriend, is obsessed with striking it rich as a three-card monte dealer, a skill only Lincoln can teach him. Both are deluded -- Lincoln by sticking to his grotesquely demeaning job and Booth with his dreams of fast money and romance. The gradual stripping away of their illusions leads to a climactic round of cards with devastating consequences.

A two-hander is almost necessarily an intensive three-way collaboration between the stars and their director; in this case, it results in performances that are remarkably intricate and emotionally on-point. As the title indicates, the brothers are bound by dependence and resentment, roiled by a constantly shifting balance of power, and Kenny Leon's staging doesn't miss a trick.

With his thousand-watt smile, Abdul-Mateen makes Booth the more obvious dreamer of the pair, whether showing off a new diamond ring ("well, diamond-esque"), demonstrating his prowess with a card hustle, or waiting patiently -- all dressed up, the dinner table laid out, champagne on ice -- for a date that will never happen. At the same time, he has a scalding tongue, especially when criticizing his brother's occupation -- "Dressing up like some crackerass white man, some dead president, and letting people shoot at you sounds like a hustle to me" -- or recalling their mother's standing meetings with her "Thursday man." And he makes a show-stopping entrance, wearing most of the contents of the clothing store that he has so efficiently robbed. (For the sake of modesty, he picks up a dressing screen, too.) Given his relative lack of theatre experience -- the actor is in both the DC and Marvel cinematic universes and was widely acclaimed for playing Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago Seven -- his work here is all the more remarkable.

In some ways, the cagey, elusive Lincoln is a more difficult role, but Hawkins shines in his character's arias, for example, describing the parade of customers who come to "assassinate" him. ("Businessmen smelling like two-for-one martinis. Tourists in they theme park T-shirts trying to catch it on film. Housewives with they mouths closed tight, shooting more than once") while fretting that he is soon to be replaced by a mannequin. There's also a kind of cracked poetry in his memories of days spent on the card hustle. ("We took that man and his wife for hundreds. No, thousands. We took them for everything they had and everything they ever wanted to have. We took a father for the money he was gonna get his kids new bike with and he cried in the street while we vanished. We took a mother's welfare check, she pulled a knife on us and we ran.")

Despite the characters' knack for getting each other's nerves, Abdul-Mateen and Hawkins demonstrate an authentic rapport when recalling the parents who abandoned them as teenagers, their mother handing each an "inheritance" of money in a sock before departing. And Leon orchestrates both their vaudevillian comedy and the underlying fraternal tensions that climax in a shock revelation and act of violence. In the end, there's only one way out of the godforsaken room, and it's an ugly one.

Maldonado's set is given extra texture by Allen Lee Hughes' lighting, which mixes stark white washes with bursts of blood-red neon through the window; he also creates eye-catching color chases, pulsing to sound designer Justin Ellington's selection of hip-hop and jazz cuts during the scene changes. Dede Ayite's costumes, including Lincoln's bizarre presidential getup, provide each character with a distinctive profile.

Topdog/Underdog is a paradoxical proposition, a dead-end tale that nevertheless pulsates with humor and a kind of electric energy. Whatever happens to Booth and Lincoln, they aren't going quietly, and their creator provides them with plenty of furious life, making clear just how much humanity, informed by brains and talent, is going to waste. Whatever echoes of other dramatists that might be heard at the Golden these nights, Parks is a singular talent with an important voice of her own and this may be her finest work. --David Barbour