Wolfe directed the 2001 Off-Broadway premier of “Topdog/Underdog” at the Public Theater as well as its Broadway debut the following year, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Tony, Grammy, and Drama Desk Award winner Billy Porter directs the Huntington production, with sets and costumes by Clint Ramos and lightingīy Driscoll Otto, the same team he worked with when directing the Huntington’s 2015 delirious and scathing production of George C.
Drawing from medieval allegorical plays, its two characters bear symbolic names and roles, but they are also fully fleshed out characters. The play is both street-smart comedy and taut drama. In “Topdog/Underdog,” Parks creates a set of paradoxes.
Her characters often are shackled to a painful past and they may or not rise above their worst impulses. Rich in theatrical wiles, the production, like the play, delivers tough truths under the guise of terrific entertainment.Ī MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Parks is a dramatist whose plays explore the legacy of slavery as well as the fundamentals of human nature. On stage through April 9 at the Avenue of the Arts/BU Theatre, the riveting Huntington production capitalizes on the playwright’s own arsenal of sleight-of-hand tricks. Lincoln has spent his money but Booth hoards his in his mother’s tightly-knotted stocking as a nest egg for his future. Their parents deserted them as youngsters, leaving each boy a wad of cash - $500. Their drunken father gave them the names as a joke. Her play is rich in metaphors, starting with the ironic names of the brothers, namesakes of John Wilkes Booth, actor and assassin, and his victim, President Abraham Lincoln, who led the country out of the Civil War and ended its era of slavery. It is a win-or-lose game that the men wage against each other and themselves. She turns three-card Monte into a metaphor for the struggle of Booth and his older brother, Lincoln, for power and self-esteem. In her brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Parks creates two characters that have been dealt a poor hand. His makeshift podium of milk crates becomes his altar and his singsong chant an incantation to summon power he cannot find within himself. He spreads his arms upward and, standing in pulsing light, resembles a high priest.
For more information and for tickets, visit: With mounting ecstasy, Booth imagines himself as a master player. The Huntington Theatre Company’s production of “Topdog/Underdog” is on stage through April 9 at the Avenue of the Arts/BU Theatre.
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