7/8/2023 0 Comments Topdog underdog theatreIt’s a play with nothing to hide, a play whose end is contained perfectly in its beginning, whose sense of a fated tragic destiny is as keen as the Greeks’–and yet we spend it wishing for some other ending than the tragedy we’ve always already seen coming. And the two key elements to the action are displayed in the play’s first moments: a game of three-card monte, and a gun. One central conflict, laid right out in the title–which is the top dog, which the underdog? (This is not a world in which there’s any possibility that they might both come out ahead.) In a dark piece of irony, even the plot is laid out right there in the character names–we all know what connects (Abraham) Lincoln and (John Wilkes) Booth, and what ends they both came to. The play is exquisitely simple: Two characters, Black brothers Lincoln and Booth (named by their father as a joke). There is no equivalent principle of “Chekhov’s deck of cards,” but Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize winner, revived on Broadway with all of its power intact twenty years later, uses the same technique: Deal a game of cards in the first act make something consequential come of winning or losing it in the second. Otherwise don’t put it there.” –Anton Chekhov “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Topdog/Underdog.
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