Leon threads a clever needle there: the visual and aural impact of Arnulfo Maldonado’s plushly bordered setting and Justin Ellington’s fused sound design are rooted in the play’s millennial era. There’s something few would have the guts to do now, even though Parks’ characters do not have to be race-specific, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has said several times.īut what makes Leon’s new staging notable is how he resists the temptation to bog down his production with the symbolism of Abraham Lincoln mythology, and any other such arcane academia, and focuses instead on making sure we believe that these vulnerable bros truly exist, right there in the “here” and the “now” of the United States of America, as Parks describes her physical and temporal settings. SYNOPSIS: Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, names given to them as a joke by. I’ve seen “Topdog/Underdog” many times before, including, some 15 years ago, a fabulously daring Chicago pairing with Shepard’s similar “True West” wherein a pair of white actors swapped roles, night-by-night, with a pair of Black actors. Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks' play "Topdog/Underdog" at the John Golden Theatre in New York.
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