Hawkins, a Tony nominee for “Six Degrees of Separation,” wears Lincoln’s restless resignation like the weathered frock coat in which he pantomimes his own assassination. The pair rib each other, go for the jugular and retreat in a poetic rhythm that brims with the gall only shared between kin.īoth stars demonstrate nimbleness and precision that all but disappear beneath their natural ease. When Lincoln calls out the stuck-together pages of Booth’s porn rag collection, the younger replies, “If I wasn’t taking care of myself by myself, I’d be out there running around” spending money he doesn’t have and shooting people “out of a need for unresolved sexual release,” and besides - he made it with Lincoln’s ex after she dumped him because he couldn’t get it up (!). They are also men of appetite, pride, and perseverance rendered in distinct detail. “But you ain’t living,” Booth replies, and Lincoln responds, “I’m alive, ain’t I?” Now, he does the “honest work” of dressing up in whiteface as the Great Emancipator, at an arcade where he rehearses his death for trigger-happy patrons. Lincoln mastered that route, but gave it up after a buddy got killed. Booth, the younger, is a schemer and a dreamer, a shoplifting whiz and hapless womanizer who exemplifies the hustle - a strategy for surviving the system by gaming it. They share cramped quarters in a rooming house, where their rivalry and reliance on each other ricochet off the walls. It’s easy to read the two brothers, named Lincoln and Booth in a mordant joke by parents who abandoned them, as allegories. Under the direction of Kenny Leon, this production fills them with swagger and heart. On the page, Parks is known for her liberal, almost sculptural, use of blank space. It’s also loose-limbed and funny and magnetically entertaining, a slow-burning display of dramatic fireworks.

The 2001 play, for which Parks became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, has attained a towering stature in American letters over the past two decades, inspiring a generation of dramatists wrestling with race, capitalism, and their blood-stained roots in our country’s history. Throw in career-high performances from Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and it is a theatrical event in the most essential sense, in that it demands to be seen here and now. The first Broadway revival, which opened at the Golden Theatre tonight, crackles like a live wire - an American fable with its finger shoved in a socket. It is a testament to the acuity of Suzan-Lori Parks’ imagination and powers of perception that “ Topdog/Underdog” feels as vital and electric today as it did 20 years ago.

Broadway topdog underdog