DOWNTOWN
NEWS
February
16, 2004
THEATER
REVIEW
By Rob Kendt
CONTRIBUTING
WRITER
From the
simple raw materials of three-card monte--a few crates and a board, cards
creased like small tents and placed in a row--a seasoned hustler can turn his
streetcorner into a kind of open-air palmist's den, as seductively intimate as
a confessional or a peep-show booth. He might as well be stroking a crystal
ball as he looks into his mark's eyes and unspools his hypnotic, reiterative
patter.
Playwright
Suzan-Lori Parks manages a similar sleight-of-hand hustle with her brilliant
two-hander Topdog/Underdog, now in a stark, stunning, roof-raising
production at the Mark Taper Forum. Dealing with a seemingly small, stacked
deck--two brothers, suggestively named Lincoln and Booth, reminisce and
recriminate over a few nights in a tatty walk-up flat--she appears to show us
her hand, all the while spinning out tangents and tricks that divert us from
the high stakes on the table.
"There's
just so much in the cards," marvels Lincoln (Harold Perrineau), a former
three-card virtuoso drawn inexorably back to the street after trying to leave
it behind. It's equally true of Parks' deceptively lean play, the best to grace
the Taper stage in years; there are untold riches in its hilariously profane
badinage, in its impish horseplay, in the unforced but undeniable mythic
suggestiveness of its iconography.
Indeed,
at times director George C. Wolfe's staging, with a bare bulb splashing tall
shadows onto Riccardo Herna ndez's stagey cutaway set, explicitly references
the disreputable pleasures of the minstrel show. Political incorrectness
doesn't begin to describe the giddy spectacle of Perrineau's Lincoln--whose
macabre day job is to slather on whiteface and dress as his ironic namesake at
an arcade shooting gallery--as he mimes alternative versions of Honest Abe's
last moments in his Ford's Theatre seat. What annoyed theatergoer, after all,
could argue that unwrapping a crinkly candy or taking a phone call in the theatre
should be capital offenses?
Even
when the staging isn't so openly presentational, there's an undercurrent of
competitive showmanship in the tale of two brothers, abandonded in their teens
by parents who just couldn't be bothered with family responsibilities anymore,
who each turned to a variety of the hustle to get by: Lincoln to a three-card
racket that ended in senseless violence, Booth to creative, even impulsive
shoplifting ("I stole generously," he says at one point, laying out
an impressive spread).
As
these two stake out territory and settle old scores, Parks gets at one of the
theater's great themes, perhaps its one great theme: the ways we all try to be
the playwrights and directors of our own lives, to make sense of their alternately
cruel and wondrous randomness by dramatizing them, by making scenes or games of
them.
There's
no scripting the vagaries of real life, though. And as this playful fraternal
scrimmage inevitably turns to a life-or-death struggle, Parks tightens her grip
and doesn't let up. It's here that Topdog/Underdog, for all its boasts and
toasts, acquires a kind of primal tragic gravity. Parks turns a pedestrian
political point--that there's no winning for these no-longer-young black men
unless The Man allows it--into a universal whoop of despair worthy of Beckett.
Wolfe
has a knockout pair of performers (somehow the word "actors" doesn't
cut it) who handle Parks' virtuosic, free-ranging monologues, and lock into a
believably well-worn camaraderie. As the older, wearier Lincoln, Perrineau
hangs fire masterfully, keeping his cards close to his vest until he comes
clean, and gets down and dirty, in the second act.
The
strutting, fretting bantam Booth has the opposite arc, from manic to
depressive. Larry Gilliard Jr.'s almost scandalously enjoyable performance in
the role is indelible, and--like much about Topdog--is deceptively
endearing. Gilliard is both a freakily dexterous, scene-stealing physical
comedian--watch him apply cologne, or clear an elegant table setting--and a
master of the scary slow burn. Not many performers have the range and control
to play us like Gilliard--milking hysterical laughter one minute, then giving
us a disturbed reverie of pin-drop intensity the next.
But
then, that's also a signature trait of Topdog/Underdog. A good playwright can
give us a great time at the theater; a great playwright can rock our world.
Parks does both: She gives us a good roll before she rocks us.