Brandon Michael Hall and Brandon Gill (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Pasadena Playhouse
Thru March 23
RECOMMENDED
Not to seem overly effusive, but Suzan-Lori Parks’s Top Dog/Underdog is one of the most extraordinary dramas of the 21st century. The play was justly rewarded with the Pulitzer in 2002, making Parks the first Black woman to achieve that distinction. In 2023, the play received the Tony Award for best revival, an indication that the success of Top Dog is no flash-in-the-pan anomaly. Indeed, it has all the makings of a modern classic.
At the risk of gilding the lily, Gregg T. Daniel, one of the most prolific and gifted directors on the Los Angeles scene, brings Parks’s genius to vivid life in a remarkable new production at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Top Dog’s only characters are Booth (Brandon Gill) and Lincoln (Brandon Micheal Hall), Black siblings skirting along the fringes of an unforgiving society. Lincoln, who has been crashing with Booth since his wife kicked him out, brings in a meager but steady paycheck from his job at a local arcade where he impersonates Abraham Lincoln— or at least as much as a Black man can impersonate the White president. That menial gig, which Lincoln bravely pronounces a “sit-down job with benefits,” consists of his sitting on a chair while tourists sneak up to “shoot” him in the head. Now, however, he may be replaced by a wax dummy, a catastrophe that would seriously imperil the brothers’ already marginal existence.
Meanwhile, Lincoln’s younger brother, Booth, has never worked. Lost in schemes and dreams, he is an optimistic force of nature with a virtuosic capacity for self-deception. However, his carefully maintained ebullience is a thin veneer that may crack at any time.
Lincoln first enters Booth’s squalid basement apartment — wonderfully realized in Tesshi Nakagawa’s superlative scenic design — in a black suit, top hat, and full white-face makeup. It’s an unsettling image that immediately signals the play’s surreal, allegorical undercurrents.
As we learn, Lincoln wasn’t always so low. He once ruled the streets as a master of three-card monte, deftly fleecing the gullible public until his partner was shot dead — a brush with mortality that made him swear off “throwing the cards” for good. Booth, however, yearns to resurrect those glory days by emulating Lincoln’s sleight-of-hand expertise. Unfortunately, no matter how much he practices, he remains hopelessly inept.
Abandoned by both parents in their youth, the brothers have forged a bond by necessity, but their ongoing reliance on one another frequently skews into cruelty — a battle for dominance that seethes with the threat of tragedy.
Top Dog brilliantly succeeds in its exploration of young Black men doomed by the systemic inequities of our culture. Yet it also succeeds on a deeply humanistic level as an examination of the pathological permutations of family bonds, from the parents who walked away to the brother/survivors who are so essential to one another — and also so expendable. Unable to compete in the outside world, the brothers fight for supremacy in their own shabby microcosm — a predestined contest in which the winner loses all.
Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molina Ave., Pasadena. Wed. and Fri., 8 pm; Thurs., 7 pm; Sat., 2 pm and 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; thru March 23. pasadenaplayhouse.org 2 hours 20 minutes with intermission.
