Review: TOPDOG/UNDERDOG at Curious Theatre

Lincoln and Booth’s father named his sons as a joke. It’s the kind of joke that becomes considerably less funny when your children actually have to live inside it.

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, now playing at Curious Theatre Company, is full of these strange inheritances. The brothers have been left with their parents’ abandonment, their memories of them, a talent for hustling, a ferocious rivalry, and two names that seem to have decided something about their relationship before either of them had a say in it. What parents pass down, eh? There are a lot of questions in this play about who we are versus what circumstances make us, and Parks is considerably more interested in asking them than providing tidy answers.

Lincoln, played by Cajardo Lindsey, is trying particularly hard to choose something different. Once a gifted Three-Card Monte hustler, he has sworn off the cards and taken a more peaceful route playing Abraham Lincoln at an arcade, where customers pay to reenact the president’s assassination. In whiteface. The image is grotesque, and the degradation inherent in the job is difficult to ignore. What surprised me, though, was how genuinely content Lindsey allows Lincoln to be there. He takes the work seriously. It gives him stability. It gives him time to write songs in his head. Oddly, he seems to enjoy himself.

That discomfort doesn’t disappear simply because Lincoln has found some peace in the work, and director Steven Sapp’s production doesn’t try to resolve the contradiction. Lincoln remains powerfully drawn to Three-Card Monte. When he finally picks up the cards at the end of Act One, Lindsey reveals the charisma necessary to win that hustle, and it is utterly magnetic. The whole audience leaned in. Booth wants desperately to learn the game, but he’s a little too brash, a little too loud; he shows the showman a bit too much. Lincoln barely seems to have to try. There’s something uncomfortable in watching a man become so vividly alive doing the very thing he has decided he should no longer do.

Lindsey is excellent throughout. More than anything, he makes Lincoln feel real. I could tell he’d been somewhere before he entered a room and knew he was headed somewhere when he left. There is always a sense of a life continuing beyond the edges of the scene, and I found myself wanting to peel back even more layers of the character. His Lincoln can be tired, funny, irritated, affectionate, wary, and suddenly commanding without any of those qualities feeling pasted onto the performance.

Rakeem Lawrence gives Booth plenty of volatility, bravado, and relentless need to prove himself. I did find myself missing a little of the hidden and guarded sensitivity underneath all that noise. Booth is thinking about settling down with Grace. He’s more nostalgic for their mother. For all his posturing, there is something a little squishy in there, and I wanted to see more of it. Particularly as the brothers’ rivalry grows more dangerous, a few more glimpses of that softness might have made Booth’s harder turns even more devastating.

Sapp’s direction is at its best when he simply puts Parks’s script on its feet and gives Lindsey and Lawrence room to work. This is an EXCELLENT playground for actors, and it’s thrilling to watch two performers work with material this dynamic. There are some pacing issues. The considerable stage business of donning and doffing clothes sometimes feels rushed, as though the production doesn’t quite trust us not to get bored watching these men simply exist in their room. At other times, the dialogue has a little too much breathing room. In a two-hander so dependent on the shifting rhythm between its characters, both kinds of disruption are particularly noticeable.

Jonathan Spencer’s lighting design is one of the production’s strongest elements. His mix of functional light pieces and more overtly theatrical lighting allows the brothers’ boarding-house room to remain convincingly real while subtly tipping its mood. The world outside the window feels alive, expanding the play beyond the room even as Lincoln and Booth remain increasingly trapped within it. Spencer’s work can alter the emotional temperature of the space without calling attention to the machinery doing so, an impressive feat in a production where realism and theatricality need to coexist.

Curious is temporarily performing at Cleo Parker Robinson Dance while its longtime theatre undergoes renovations. The temporary space is comfortable and more than up to the task, though the set initially feels a little small against the larger stage. Perhaps that ultimately works for a play about two brothers crammed into a tiny boarding-house room. There is something appropriate about watching their world occupy so little space.

There are moments when Topdog/Underdog feels like it could have benefited from more time—the occasional pacing issues, the stage business that hasn’t quite settled— but I’m grateful Curious chose this play. The company consistently brings interesting, complicated scripts to Colorado stages, and there is real pleasure in watching actors sink their teeth into material this rich. Lindsey and Lawrence get an extraordinary playground; audiences get a play that asks far more questions than it answers.

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