I deeply admired Kenny Leon’s Broadway staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” in 2022 because the veteran director emphasized the humor and humanity in what is indisputably among the very best American plays of the last 25 years. It’s a symbolically weighty drama that often finds itself squelched by overly academic productions; Leon, working with the producer David Stone and the actors Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins, cut away all pretentiousness, foregrounded its bravura acting roles, pumped up its showbiz bona fides and made it pulse with life. Agonizingly so.
In essence, Leon’s Broadway production has now been restaged as Steppenwolf’s fall opener with ensemble members Glenn Davis and Namir Smallwood in the roles of Lincoln and Booth.
They are perfectly cast.
Many Chicago theatergoers will have seen this two-character play before. (Gift Theatre produced it in 2024, American Theater Company famously paired it with Sam Shepard’s “True West” in 2009, an inspired idea, and Steppenwolf itself memorably staged the show in 2003 with David Rainey and K. Todd Freeman under Amy Morton’s direction.) But if you are not among that group, here’s the basic low-down.
We are flies on the wall inside the small apartment of two brothers named Lincoln and Booth — as part of a parental joke, they surmise in the play. (This production includes essentially the same rich Broadway set and costumes from the designers Arnulfo Maldonado and Dede Ayite.) One of those brothers has followed the inference of his moniker and secured a job as a human carnival attraction, wherein he dresses as Honest Abe so that he can be shot at multiple times a day by fairgoers looking to re-enact Lincoln’s assassination. He is aware of the singularity of his emasculating employment, which requires him to paint his face white, and he fears replacement by a wax dummy — the AI, I suppose, of 2001, when Parks wrote this play.
Booth, meanwhile, lives mostly confined to this apartment, dreaming of being a three-card monte hustler like his brother, but also of love and romance beyond the piles of pornographic magazines he keeps under his bed. He craves some degree of normalcy but also is a younger brother in the most complex of fraternal relationships — spawned and compromised by less than ideal parenting.
How far from ideal gradually unfolds during the play, in riveting fashion.
The play operates on a human level as a story of two impoverished and abandoned brothers (hence the Sam Shepard pairing in 2009). Biut it’s also a metaphor for America itself, a nation wherein two of its demonstrably talented citizens are forced into a primal battle for survival, forced to become con artists to combat the stacked deck wherein they find themselves the marks. On one level, it’s a portrait of creative Black men looking for love after a childhood in which it was denied them; on another, it’s an indictment of inequality and the pernicious impact of loneliness and rejection. The frequent presence here of Old Abe’s visage, and whiteness painted on an artificially bearded Black face, focuses the mind on emancipatory promises unfulfilled.
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We all encounter smoldering people who seem on the edge of blowing up at any moment, probably through no fault of their own. I’ve always seen this play fundamentally as an exploration of the different ways in which young men try to manage their rage and their inner sadness. There are a couple of moments here where the remarkable Smallwood, who just keeps getting more intense and vulnerable with every show in both in Chicago and New York that I’ve seen him, perfectly encapsulates how that which his character loves, and that which he wants to destroy, keep colliding, ripping his fragile emotions apart.
One question of the play is whether Davis is playing Booth’s doppelganger or destroyer, or both at once. Lots of academics over the last 25 years have approached this play as though Parks had split one individual into two. But we are watching two characters, two lives.
In the world of the play, Davis has to embody a man who uses energy and loquaciousness to fight off his demons and, well, that is precisely what he does for the duration of the evening, switching back and forth between hot and cold, empathetic and callous, upbeat and defeatist, intermittently shocking and shocked.
Parks, to my mind, was writing about people who cannot easily get to the source of their economic and emotional troubles because it was so foundational, both in the parental and nationalistic senses of that word. So I suppose it is fair to call “Topdog/Underdog” an American tragedy. It is for me.
But it’s also, in this clever production, which I thought under-appreciated on Broadway, an entertaining exploration of entertaining entertainment. With these two actors, it makes you feel complicit as you watch and laugh at this ersatz Lincoln and Booth performing their sad-sack realities for your pleasure and enjoyment. That so often having been the American way.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Topdog/Underdog” (4 stars)
When: Through Nov. 1
Where: Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes
Tickets: $20-$143 at 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org