Not that you can name those feelings you don’t have time. And of course, sleight of hand: Before a minute goes by, Parks has her fingerprints all over your feelings. The endlessly sorrowful loop of American violence. There’s fraternal competition, as old and awful as Jacob and Esau. Rejecting fixed meanings, as well as the limitations and clichés of correctness, she generates themes that her play will not so much corral as set free. How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks’s fearlessness. (“I stole and I stole generously,” he crows.) They are bonded by familiarity, mistrust and, as their names suggest, a history beyond their own.

The spieler is his brother, Booth, whose vocation seems to be shoplifting. Though this Lincoln, like the one he’s named for, wears the requisite frock coat and stovepipe hat, we see at once that he’s a Black man in whiteface, and soon learn that he earns $314 a week for letting customers at an arcade pretend to shoot him. Her skittering silverfish of a play, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, glints with meaning that refuses to stay put.

In a seedy rooming house apartment, as one man rehearses his three-card monte spiel - “watch me close, watch me close now” - Abraham Lincoln arrives with Chinese takeout.īut watch Parks, too. Among the most thrilling and jarring gambits in modern theater, up there with the nattering woman half-buried in sand at the top of Beckett’s “Happy Days,” is the scene that opens Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” with a bang.

Top dog underdog play