Parks had the peculiar genius to think about a personality that encapsulates the contradictions of our shaky republic: A Black man who performs in whiteface as his namesake, our sixteenth and most revered president. No, he’s not reciting the second inaugural or the Gettysburg Deal with; he’s letting wannabe John Wilkes Cubicles shoot him with blanks dozens of instances every day at what’s described merely as “an arcade,” in one in all Parks’s surreal thrives.
“It’s straightforward work,” Lincoln insists to his little brother, should you can ignore the nesting-doll layers of humiliation baked into it — together with the actual fact he fears shedding even this dire gig to a wax dummy. Sales space is under no circumstances inclined to miss these not-so-micro aggressions.
“Topdog/Underdog” isn’t set in any specified time or place, however its insular story of two deeply remoted brothers and roommates has uncannily predicted the air of menacing unreality that now surrounds our public discourse.
Director Jamil Jude’s assured Spherical Home Theatre revival, anchored by nimble and entrancing performances from Ro Boddie and Yao Dogbe as Lincoln and Sales space, respectively, harvests each be aware of humor and pathos from Parks’s immortal script. These brothers had been deserted by their dad and mom at an impressionable age, every given an “inheritance” of $500. Their most prized possession is an album of images from their distinctly un-idyllic childhood, which Sales space, specifically, is given to reminiscing about. He even claims to need to emulate their negligent mother and pop, declaring his ambition to sire many offspring after which go away them to determine issues out on their very own.
Not that both of them have discovered very a lot. Sales space needs Lincoln to return to his former calling as a cardsharp, taking the identical slack-jawed rubes who now line as much as shoot him for all of the money they’ve obtained at three-card monte. Sales space even rehearses Lincoln’s quick dealing and sooner patter (“Watch me now!”) when he’s residence alone, and tries to get his brother to deal with him as “Three Card.”
Alas, his personal sticky fingers are more proficient at shoplifting than card-throwing. Regardless of his infantile insistence {that a} girl named Grace is so gobsmacked by his pilfered prosperity that she’s each consented to unprotected intercourse and demanded that he marry her, Sales space is completely confounded by the perceived unfairness of the fairer intercourse. As for Lincoln, his spouse left him years in the past — then briefly sought solace in Sales space’s mattress!
They’ve had a tough time of it, these two brothers.
The despair they’re each working additional time to maintain at bay is so omnipresent and oppressive that Jude, Boddie and Dogbe should mine each kernel of levity simply to maintain the enterprise from being too miserable to endure. One among these gags comes early, when Dogbe performs a type of clown-car variation on a striptease, someway producing a whole pilfered wardrobe from beneath his outsized parka — not simply two full fits, however two pairs of costume sneakers. “I stole, and I stole generously,” he gloats. (The costume designer has dressed Dogbe’s Sales space in an previous Washington Bullets T-shirt, a welcome native contact.)
All through the lengthy night, the sunshine of a neon signal — one we are able to’t fairly learn — suspended exterior the window of Meghan Raham’s appropriately dingy set bathes the brothers’ barren residence in a hellish crimson solid. The subtextual question beneath every stanza of Parks’s lacerating dialogue is, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We already know the reply, but it surely hits with the power of a bullet all the identical.
Topdog/Underdog, by means of June 23 at Spherical Home Theatre. About 2½ hours, together with an intermission. roundhousetheatre.org.
