Topdog/Underdog

Play (2001)
by Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Kadeem Ali Harris
Lanes Coven Theater Company
Windhover Performing Arts Center
Rockport, MA
May 30 – June 15, 2025

With Adrianna Mitchell (Booth), Akilah A. Walker (Lincoln)

Lincoln (Akilah A. Walker), a former three-card monte expert, now has a job at an ongoing arcade playing Abraham Lincoln, donned in whiteface and a stovepipe hat. He is living, for the moment, with his younger brother Booth (Adrianna Mitchell) who, at present, is trying to make it as a three-card monte expert, but is well aware of the fact that he has much to learn to come up to the level of expertise that Lincoln has previously exhibited. The two go back and forth about the prospect of working together on a three-card monte routine, but Lincoln really wants to get out from under and is proud of having a more or less normal, regular paying, job.

Booth has a girlfriend – Grace – that he’s trying to get serious about and sets up a special dinner for her at the apartment, but she doesn’t show up. Lincoln loses his job playing Lincoln at the arcade and considers the possibility of engaging with Booth on the three-card monte routine, but it does not go anywhere; Booth announces that he’s hoping to get married and that Lincoln will have to move. Expectations and drama accelerate and things develop unexpectedly.

This vividly exciting production of this intense and powerful play features two women in the roles of the brothers, and the choice to do so works very well. There is no pretense to convey the roles as other than male, but having the women in those roles adds a new and interesting dimension to the dramatic interpretation. As the two wonderful actors – Adrianna Mitchell (Booth), Akilah A. Walker (Lincoln) – point out in an interview, the author Suzan Lori-Parks is indeed a black woman and there is good reason to think that bringing women into these roles is an inventive way to bring out a core feature of this work. As both actors note, it’s very important to understand that Parks expresses a deep love for these characters, and, through them, the play offers a sense of deep compassion for black men. Having two black women actors do that is a courageous choice that provides a moving result.

Essentially, the play is a fusion of the poetic and the realistic in a way that can be confounding but which is given a curious and interesting twist by casting women in these roles. Clearly, having two black brothers identified as Lincoln and Booth sets the play up, from the outset, as a kind of poetic extravagance. In order to get behind it, from the beginning one has to establish that we are in the land of metaphor and symbolism. What makes that somewhat difficult is that the characters and the setting are so down to earth and vividly evocative of inner-city living – of the conditions of poverty, despair and limited social promise. So, the placing of women in these roles adds to the built-in metaphorical dimension of the play, making it clear that one needs to see things with a poetic eye while absorbing all of the grittiness of the vividly real conditions portrayed.

Again, since we’re in a kind of poetic space, what ensues between the two brothers is not something tied to their realistic relationship, but something evocative of the conditions and psyche of black men in the contemporary world. The rivalry and compulsive violence attributed to the characters in this play is not necessarily meant to follow from their depicted relationship per se – their rivalry is not so vividly depicted in the play itself – but rather expresses the tragedy of their oppressed psyches overall. What happens in the denouement is more a function of the general condition of being oppressed and downtrodden than it is about the particular relationship of these brothers.

The two actors are really brilliant. Both Adrianna Mitchell as Booth, and Akilah A. Walker as Lincoln, carry off the required fast patter of the three-card monte dealer with fluency and verbal excitement. In addition to this capacity for bringing out the jazzy and driven sides of their characters, these talented actors convey the deep tragedies of the depicted lives with gravitas and intensity. Together, under the astute direction of Kadeem Ali Harries, they have forged a portrayal that is memorable and vivid. Both are intense performances – Walker’s more brooding, Mitchell’s more manic – and they make a wonderful duo, exhibiting the deep tragedy of this notable work with depth and passion.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)