Topdog/Underdog Broadway Reviews

The director of 'Topdog,' Kenny Leon-who was nominated for a Tony for directing the sensitive 2020 revival of 'A Soldier's Play'-emphasizes the dialogue's overheard quality, the shoot-the-shit ease that the brothers have together. His work with the actors is light but sure. Abdul-Mateen-swaggering, buoyant, easily offended-reacts behind the beat, maintaining his optimism for a minute after bad news comes through. Hawkins, on the other hand, stays just ahead of the moment, his shoulders crumpling slightly, like a card that's been thumbed too much, even when the brothers seem to be getting along. They are both wonderful, but Hawkins gives a sly, peekaboo performance that rolls up next to you like a grenade.

Directed by Kenny Leon (who nabbed a Tony in 2014 for his A Raisin in the Sun), Topdog/Underdog lays bare the push and pull of American aspirationalism. The play, about two Black brothers wrestling with their history of parental abandonment and desire for economic stability, is airy and oblique. Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) and Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) are the only characters. Their conversations - facetious, verbose, skittish - propel the narrative, reveal their personalities and betray their intentions. In less assured hands, the production could get lost in Parks' jazzy dialogue and structural sleights of hand, but Leon, with the help of his two stars, confidently steers the play until the final curtain.

Back on Broadway in a top-notch new production, Suzan-Lori Parks's 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, Topdog/Underdog, bubbles over with timeless talking points. The always intriguing playwright reckons with race, identity, fractured families, and the elusive chase for grace. At its core - and right there in the title - the play also concerns power. Someone's always got more of it, and that disparity breeds trouble. For this harrowing and humorous two-hander to reach its full firepower, it takes actors equal in might. Director Kenny Leon has cast a pair of aces who consistently match each other across the tragicomic tone shifts.

The writing and direction are scythe-sharp and precise, and Hawkins' and Abdul-Mateen's are two superlative performances-for this critic, the standout of this current Broadway season so far: energetic, witty, mischievous, searing, tender, and vulnerable.

Topdog/Underdog is the sound of the streets, the sound of hip-hop, the sound of Black poverty Black tragedy, and importantly, Black joy; it's tough, it's gritty, it's lyrical, it's beautiful, it's poetry. And it requires two actors who can do its lyricism justice. For this 20th anniversary production, the play has found its perfect conduits in Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton, In the Heights) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (HBO's Watchmen, The Matrix Resurrections).

Parks' use of this particular card game as metaphor, in which the dealer has to be really quick to fool his customers - some of whom lose their life savings on a bet -- is rather brilliant. If nothing else, 'Topdog/Underdog' is a show about life's winners and losers. Moreover, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen, giving two of the best performances I've seen this season (or any season), manage the remarkable feat of making their repetitive practice rounds of three-card monte nothing short of hypnotic. Equally stunning is how the pair precisely captures the dynamic of their sibling relationship, which has been gorgeously laid out by Parks. Despite towering over Hawkins (which is especially noticeable in the scenes in which he wears boxer shorts and his ultra-long legs are displayed) Abdul-Mateen is (until he's not) the adoring, 'smaller' younger brother, constantly looking up to his older sibling for advice and affirmation.

Make no mistake: After an evening on Broadway with Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and the electrifying theatrical crossfire of 'Topdog/Underdog,' you'll never again think of three-card monte as a mere money-grubbing street hustle. Thanks to the wild imagination of Suzan-Lori Parks - who won a Pulitzer Prize for the play in 2002 - the game is engineered as the centerpiece in the blistering struggle between Hawkins's Lincoln and Mateen's Booth, brothers possessing little in life and even less to hope for.

Parks' writing is already something to behold. She masterfully navigates all that her work wants to hold. Dealing in equal parts humor alongside shame, guilt and despair, Topdog/Underdog covers the world without running itself ragged. It's a testament to Parks' enduring mastery of craft, creativity and empathy. But to witness her words under Kenny Leon's direction is to see something truly kinetic and alive, completely stripped of niceties or pandering. The work is ugly, at times, cracked right open, but familiar and loving. It's a balanced embracement of the siblings' love and mischievousness alongside their ordained dysfunction.

As wrenching as this 'Topdog' ultimately is, in fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a better time inside a Broadway theater this fall. And that's no hustle.

How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks's fearlessness. Rejecting fixed meanings, as well as the limitations and clichés of correctness, she generates themes that her play will not so much corral as set free. There's fraternal competition, as old and awful as Jacob and Esau. Race as fate but also performance. The endlessly sorrowful loop of American violence. And of course, sleight of hand: Before a minute goes by, Parks has her fingerprints all over your feelings.

Now the show is back on Broadway, opening Thursday at the Golden Theatre, where director Kenny Leon has orchestrated two riveting performances from young stars best known for their onscreen work: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ('Watchmen') plays the older brother, Lincoln, a former street hustler with a demeaning and dead-end job as an Abe Lincoln impersonator in whiteface; while Corey Hawkins ('Straight Outta Compton') is younger brother Booth, an unemployed man who gets by shoplifting his basic needs while yearning for his brother's abandoned skills at three-card monte to make some real money.

Reviving a classic the caliber of Suzan-Lork Parks' Topdog/Underdog, which deserved and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, is a bit like a high-stakes version of three-card monte. There are so many ways that the contributing elements, no matter how distinguished the contributors, could surface to throw the game. In this production, every single aspect turns up a winner.

It is a testament to the acuity of Suzan-Lori Parks' imagination and powers of perception that 'Topdog/Underdog' feels as vital and electric today as it did 20 years ago. The first Broadway revival, which opened at the Golden Theatre tonight, crackles like a live wire - an American fable with its finger shoved in a socket. Throw in career-high performances from Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and it is a theatrical event in the most essential sense, in that it demands to be seen here and now.

As Lincoln, Hawkins (from the 'In The Heights' film, 'BlacKkKlansman') is weathered by the world - bruised, tired and punishing, but also grandfatherly for someone so young. (Maybe it's the fake Abe beard.) When he furiously deals three-card monte, the actor drives the speeches with Nascar adrenaline. Hawkins is thrilling.

Twenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog has lost none of its vitality and power and cunning. Director Kenny Leon proves that in a vibrant new production opening tonight at the Golden Theatre.

Reviving a classic the caliber of Suzan-Lork Parks' Topdog/Underdog, which deserved and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, is a bit like a high-stakes version of three-card monte. There are so many ways that the contributing elements, no matter how distinguished the contributors, could surface to throw the game. In this production, every single aspect turns up a winner.

Suzan-Lori Parks' 'Topdog/Underdog' is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century. And on Broadway, the director Kenny Leon has put this 2001 masterpiece back on a fresh, vital pedestal.

A key to appreciating 'Topdog/Underdog' is understanding that it was never really here and now. The play is less a literal depiction of two down-and-out Black brothers than a smart, dark, often funny allegory, with subtle allusions to the Bible (Cain and Abel) and less subtle similarities to classic Theater of the Absurd. There is little linear story here but daily life shot through with layer after layer of metaphor.

'I am a brother playing Lincoln. It's a stretch for anyone's imagination,' explains an early-middle-aged Black male who makes a living impersonating Abraham Lincoln (with a suit, beard, top hat, and whiteface makeup) as part of a bizarre arcade attraction where patrons can reenact Lincoln's assassination in 'Topdog/Underdog,' Suzan-Lori Parks' gritty, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of sibling rivalry, which is now receiving an excellent 20th anniversary Broadway revival starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ('The Trial of the Chicago 7') and Corey Hawkins ('In the Heights').

For all of the circularness of 'Topdog/Underdog,' Leon does a great job of finding its dramatic points. With only two actors and a room, the play serves up a harsh account of the ills faced by America's underdogs but does so with enough laughter to help the med-sin go down sweet. Gambling, cheating, stealing - you almost forget they are sins in a play this holy.

A strong if not entirely satisfying new Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog suggests another way in which the play bridged two eras or dispensations. Directed with naturalistic brio by Kenny Leon, a seasoned hand with August Wilson, this new Topdog feels closer to a ritual restaging of a consensus classic-i.e., a play by Wilson or Lorraine Hansberry-than to the buzzy re-anointing of a generational talent, creative ancestor of such writers as Aleshea Harris or Jackie Sibblies Drury.

'Topdog/Underdog' feels oddly out of step with the times. While Hollywood has been re-examining black experience-painfully but not without moments of inspiration-in movies such as 'Till,' 'Hidden Figures' and 'Selma,' or reimagining it in action films like 'Black Panther' and 'The Woman King,' Ms. Parks's play depicts its characters as all but doomed to a life of poverty and shiftlessness.

The two actors have excellent chemistry and are believable in their brotherhood and shared pain. Parks' writing-the way she builds and releases tension; constructs vivid histories out of thin air; broadens the scope of her story without ever losing sight of the people onstage-is still excellent; that won't change. But a production of Topdog/Underdog should feel like American mythology, something worthy of the text's well-earned Lincoln/Booth-Cain/Abel comparisons. The dramatic drapery Maldonado places around the studio apartment suggest something bigger, a grand veil of theatricality covering a national schism. Much of the production, however, only gets at the world's best-looking arcade exhibit.