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Lincoln returns home in the fifth scene of Topdog/Underdog to find Booth expecting a visit from his girlfriend. Lincoln has just lost his job at the arcade and squandered the money from...
Lincoln was 16 and Booth was 11 when their parents left. Before they left, their parents gave each of the boys $500, which they call their inheritance. As Booth discusses the illusion of a happy family life, he grows angry with Grace and what he thinks she's trying to take from him.
In the final scene, which takes place the following evening, Lincoln bursts into the apartment yelling, “Taaadaaaa!” Alone, he pulls from his pocket $500 and recounts the triumphs of the day, which he spent hustling people on the streets in Three-Card Monte.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
Like the title suggests, Topdog/Underdog (published in 2001) is a play about competition, reversals, and mirror images that reflect the true self. The idea that became Topdog/Underdog can be found in one of Parks's earlier plays, The America Play (1995), which features a gravedigger named the Foundling Father whose obsession with Abraham Lincoln le...
Suzan-Lori Parks, the daughter of an Army colonel, was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1964. As a member of a military family, Parks moved often, first to west Texas and then to Germany, where she settled during her teenage years. While attending German schools, Parks began to write short stories. When she returned to the United States, Parks atten...
Scene 1
The play opens on a Thursday evening in a boardinghouse room with Booth practicing his three-card monte routine over a board supported by two milk crates. He practices his patter, imagining that he has won a large sum of money. Lincoln, wearing a frock coat, top hat, and fake beard, sneaks up behind his brother, who whirls and pulls a gun. Booth tells Lincoln to take off his disguise because he fears Lincoln's getup will scare Grace, with whom Booth has a date the next day. Booth claims that...
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
• Although no audio recording of the play's production currently exists, a DVD entitled The Topdog Diaries provides a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for the Off-Broadway production of Topdog/Underdog, directed by George C. Wolfe at New York's Public Theater. The performance features Don Cheadle in the role of Booth and Jeffrey Wright as Lincoln. The Topdog Diariesis produced by Storyville Films and is available through most online film retailers. Booth suggests that they work as a team,...
Scene 2
The scene opens with Booth dressed like he is about to go on an Arctic expedition and checking to see if Lincoln is home. As he undresses, he reveals layers of clothing that he has stolen. He lays one suit on Lincoln's easy chair and another on his own bed. He sets two glasses and a bottle of whiskey on top of the stacked milk crates. Booth sits in a chair pretending to read a magazine when Lincoln walks in. Lincoln enters the room to the sound of improvised fanfare. Booth knows that today, F...
Best Customer
The Best Customer is a "miscellaneous stranger" who visits the arcade daily to shoot Honest Abe. The Best Customer "[s]hoots on the left whispers on the right." Link is unsure whether the Best Customer, a black male, knows that Link is also a "brother." The Best Customer utters cryptic messages that possess a quasi-metaphysical quality. He goes so far as to whisper a message in Honest Abe's ear after he has been shot. Link does not think much of the Best Customer, though, ironically, he ackno...
Booth
Booth is Link's younger brother, who aspires to become a master of the three-card monte. He rents the room the brothers share, although he does not hold down a job. Instead, he earns his living as a petty thief. Booth tries to get Link to show him how to throw the cards, but Link refuses, which infuriates Booth. Booth believes that if he knew how to throw the cards, he could earn lots of money with which he could win Grace's heart. Booth calls himself "3-Card" to bolster his confidence. Howev...
Cookie
Cookie is Link's wife from whom he is now divorced. One night, she comes over to Booth'sapartment looking for Link, who is out drinking, but ends up having sexual relations with his brother, who promises to marry her if she leaves Link. She justifies her actions because Link is sexually impotent, which contradicts his portrayal of himself as a ladies man.
History
The play is imbued with a strong sense of history, though it is of a more personal nature than the type of history associated with textbooks. Throughout Topdog/Underdog, the brothers reveal parts of their past that have shaped their present circumstances. For example, Lonny's death influenced Lincoln's decision to stop dealing three-card monte. When Booth shows Lincoln the ring he boosted, he reveals a past relationship with Grace that has been nothing short of disappointing. Similarly, durin...
Identity
Identity is an important theme within the play. Although Lincoln may share the name of The Great Emancipator, he knows who he is before he ever donned his costume. "I was Lincoln on my own before any of that," he says. This knowledge allows Lincoln to wear his costume home on the bus without confusion about his identity. In fact, Lincoln is able to swindle the "little rich kid" out of twenty dollars because he knows he no longer plays the role of Honest Abe once he leaves the arcade. The Linc...
Illusion
Illusion is at the very heart of the three-card monte hustle. Not only must the dealer be a master of sleight-of-hand, but he, with the help of his crew, creates confusion to beat his mark. The crew deflects the mark's attention so that he loses track of reality (i.e., the card's location). Furthermore, by pretending not to want to throw the cards, the dealer creates the illusion that he is an unwilling participant. Knowing what is real and what is not is the key to winning a hand of three-ca...
Naturalism
Topdog/Underdogis less fantastic than some of Parks's other plays. Though the set design evokes social realism, the play is naturalistic in the sense that Lincoln and Booth respond to the environmental forces, such as poverty, that shape their lives externally, as well as to the private desires and ambitions that exert an equal, if not greater, force psychically. The brothers are subject to deterministic sociological and economic forces that lead them to contemplate a life of petty crime. Fur...
Humor
Parks often uses humor to underscore the tragedy of a particular situation as it offsets the dire circumstances the play's protagonists live in. Moreover, humor serves to leaven the pathos of the situation, particularly when one of the protagonists appears to struggle against a sense of inertia that has plagued him throughout his life. For example, Booth's attempts to win Grace's heart after their two-year separation is placed in a comical light when he tells Lincoln that he has boosted a "di...
Language
Booth and Lincoln both speak a street language that is raw with power and filled with poetry. Their speech is also marked by profanity that assaults the very essence of the person it is directed against. By eliminating the use of apostrophes in contractions, Parks, following the example of the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, creates a language on the printed page that is immediate and unpolished, yet it contains a quality of verisimilitude that reflects her characters' true nature...
The Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln
As the American Civil War was drawing to a close, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, attended a performance of Our American Cousin, a musical comedy, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. While Lincoln sat in his box seat in the balcony, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and rebel sympathizer from Maryland, sneaked into the president's box and fired one shot at point-blank range from his Deringer, shouting, "Sic simper tyrannis!" ("Thus always to tyrants"). Some reports have...
Blackface
Blackface minstrelsy was among the most popular forms of live entertainment in America during the years preceding the Civil War. Minstrel shows featured white entertainers who wore blackface to imitate the mannerisms and speech of Southern slaves or slaves who had been freed in the North. Many minstrel routines included singing and dancing that bordered on caricature. The entertainer Al Jolson brought this tradition to the silver screen in the film entitled The Jazz Singer, which was the firs...
Les Gutman, reviewing the original Off-Broadway production for the Internet theater magazine CurtainUp, observes that, "with Topdog/Underdog, [Suzan-Lori Parks] has taken a giant step toward fulfilling the promise with which she was labeled." He finds the narrative "linear and quite straightforward" compared to some of Parks's earlier plays, which ...
David Remy
Remy is a freelance writer in Warrington, Florida. In this essay, Remy considers the ways in which Parks's use of historical references and figures belies a more compelling sense of personal history within the play. Topdog/Underdog is a play rich in historical overtones, yet these should not be confused with events that shaped the course of American social and political development during the years after the Civil War. Although the Lincoln assassination exerts a pervading influence on how the...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks have been noted especially for their reworking of history to provide audiences with political and social commentary that is relevant to today's society. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) creates a new view of history that debunks many of the racial stereotypes about blacks that Parks uses to tell her story. Featuring characters with names like Black Man with Watermelon, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, Lots of Grease and Lots of...
Catherine Dybiec Holm
Holm is a short storyand novel author, and a freelance writer. In this essay, Holm looks at how the brothers in this play prey on each other's insecurities in a tailspin toward tragedy. Topdog/Underdogis a play about the tension and the contrast between two brothers. Each brother struggles with his own demons. Booth feels inferior to Lincoln. Lincoln is trying to live a respectable life, with a real job. Each brother preys on the other brother's shortcomings, propelling this play toward its v...
Brustein, Robert, "On Theater—A Homeboy Godot," in the New Republic, May 13, 2002, p. 25. Fanger, Iris, "Pulitzer Prize Winner Shakes Off Labels," in the Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2002, p. 19. Garrett, Shawn-Marie, "The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks," in American Theatre, Vol. 17, No. 8, October 2000, p. 22. Gutman, Les, Review of Origi...
Topdog/Underdog is a play by American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks which premiered in 2001 off-Broadway in New York City. The next year it opened on Broadway, at the Ambassador Theatre , where it played for several months.
Scene Five. Scene five begins after intermission, and it opens with Booth alone in the apartment, surrounded by “all the makings of a romantic dinner for two.”
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The final scene ends with Booth cradling his brother’s body and screaming. Topdog/Underdog shows how history, whether personal, familial, or cultural, shapes the present. Parks’s signature style involves rhythmic dialogue and heightened dialect, which is less overt in Topdog/Underdog than some of her more esoteric works but still evident in ...
