Topdog/Underdog
Abandoned as adolescents by their parents, Lincoln and Booth share a run-down room in an SRO, locked in a sad and dangerous bond of codependency, rivalry, depression, and love. Lincoln, the elder brother, is a past master of the three-card monte scam. “Back in the day,” as he puts it, he ruled the street with his con game. A failed marriage, a bout with alcoholism, and the shooting death of his partner have made him go straight. He’s landed legitimate employment–“a sit-down job with benefits,” he brags. But what a job it is: wearing whiteface and a stovepipe hat, he impersonates Abraham Lincoln in an arcade attraction where patrons are invited to reenact the president’s assassination by “shooting” him in the back of the head with a cap gun.
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Morton’s detailed, keen-eyed staging takes its cue from that description. Every sentence of the text is perfectly wedded to the actors’ gestural vocabulary, yet the performances never feel choreographed or stylized. Rainey as the world-weary Lincoln and Freeman as the intense, comic, yet dangerous Booth create convincing, compelling characters even when Parks’s play lets them down.
