STAGE WEST
  • Home
  • About David
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Theatre Reviews
  • New Page

Theater reviews

Stage West

Lincoln, Booth and brotherhood

1/1/2012

0 Comments

 
​An inescapable claustrophobia prevails in ion theatre’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog. All the action in the two-hour drama unfolds in a drab, barely furnished boardinghouse room where brothers Lincoln and Booth reside. (If those names strike you as ironic, be assured it’s strictly intentional.) Lincoln (Mark Christopher Lawrence) and Booth (Laurence Brown) are also the only characters in Parks’ play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. They’re trapped together by the fates and by the confines of the little room they share. In Ion’s black-box space, you are trapped with them. It can be mesmerizing, as when Lincoln, an old pro at Three Card Monte, shows his brother his stuff; and it can be harrowing, especially when the more volatile Booth is on the verbal offensive. But you just can’t look away.
            Older brother Lincoln, desolate and ditched by his wife, Cookie, is working at an arcade where he dresses up like Honest Abe – in stovepipe hat, beard and whiteface – and allows customers to “shoot” him for kicks. Booth is a petty thief, a smooth (or so he thinks) operator and an aspiring Monte dealer. He’s got a girlfriend, “Amazing Grace,” but we only see Booth with the girlie magazines he hides underneath the boardinghouse room’s one bed (Lincoln sleeps in a chair). Booth may consider himself Topdog to Linc’s Underdog, but in fact these two are both underdogs, and we intuit very early on that they’re both going under.
            Lawrence and Brown are major presences on stage – Linc in his sad-eyed weariness, Brown in his swaggering physicality. And most of the time, Parks’ astringent dialogue is enough to keep the drama moving forward, even in such a static setting. Director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg has crafted a mini-world of melancholy and ultimately, mayhem. (What do you expect from a play with characters named Lincoln and Booth?)
            The Lincoln/Booth metaphor is what it is, and the Pulitzer committee obviously responded to it. But the strength of Parks’ characters, and of Lawrence and Brown’s performances, is in the realization of two underdogs’ desperation, two brothers’ inexorable blood ties. In the end, you must decide whether those ties have been broken and at what cost.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    David L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic.

    Archives

    July 2025
    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    August 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    January 2016
    January 2015
    December 2014
    January 2014
    January 2013
    January 2012
    January 2011

    Categories

    All
    Theatre Review

David Coddon

About 
David Coddon Fiction
Theatre Reviews

Support

Contact
FAQ
Terms of Use
© COPYRIGHT 2017. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About David
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Theatre Reviews
  • New Page