Topdog/Underdog (review)

Topdog/Underdog. By Suzan-Lori Parks. The Public Theater, New York City. 14 July 2001.

In recent decades an alternative American drama has thrown wide the doors of traditional psychological realism to let in an expansive vision of American history, geography, and speech. Suzan-Lori Parks is perhaps the leader—certainly the exemplar—of that drama. The large themes (and memorable titles) of such plays as The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, and Venus have placed Parks securely within both the repertoire and the curricula of challenging contemporary theatre, where she has come to represent the hitherto untapped poetic potential of the American stage. Her characteristic vision—that of a totally unsentimental eye viewing a dauntingly wide vista—puts her in the tradition of Mark Twain and William Faulkner, while her faith in the power of poetry to unearth historical truths buried beneath sedimented layers of racial prejudice and other lies recalls the exuberant politics of Walt Whitman. As for the dramaturgy she seems so effortlessly to have gifted to the contemporary theatre, it shares with visionaries like Robert Wilson and Reza Abdoh an understanding of the stage as an entire universe rather than merely a room.

Yet Parks avoids the traps of universalism and essentialism, for no matter how immense her stage picture, its poetry is always carefully attuned to the sound of specific peoples, places, and ideas. This combination of magnitude and specificity—this ability to use theatre to think and feel very particular things about sweeping historical subjects set in vast landscapes—has established Parks as a both a theatrical and literary artist, one who reinvents dramatic forms as she uses them.

In her latest play, Topdog/Underdog, produced this summer at The Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City, Suzan-Lori Parks would seem to be reinventing psychological realism itself, the very dramatic form that till now she seemed to have the least use for. Indeed at first glance Topdog/Underdog strikes one as a retreat for Parks, a move backwards both in terms of dramatic history as well as in terms of the poetic imagination that illuminates her earlier plays.

The stage picture is the first to register this apparent recoil: instead of the openness and diffused spatiality that so powerfully conveyed the searching nature of her earlier dramaturgy, this stage is not just a room, but an archetypal room, a room with a vengeance. It is tiny, windowless, with only one door (only one way in or out). A very emblem of limits and boundaries, the room has place for only one of everything: a bed, a chair, a table, a mirror. The poignancy of this minimalism emerges early in the play, when one of the room's occupants must sleep in the lone armchair, marking the sad contingency of his occupancy in this, his brother's home.

The impression of revisionism is supported by the fact that a major plot element is borrowed from a previous play. The central—and brilliant—conceit of The America Play concerned an African American man who made his living impersonating Lincoln in an amusement park, where patrons paid to play the role of his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. In Topdog/Underdog, Lincoln and Booth are two brothers (whose parents named them as a joke!) and one of whom is playing out his nominal destiny by working as a Lincoln look-alike (in whiteface and top hat) at an amusement park. If this occupation (like the story of the parents' sense of humor) stretches the verisimilitude that is realism's bread and butter, it is a deliberate stretch, one that eventually leads us back to Parks's poetic dramaturgy.

The literalness of the play's setting is, like its apparent literary mode, only skin deep. Within this grim interior lurks a vast metaphoric potentiality, both poetic and political. It is signaled already in the play's title, with its combination of linguistic playfulness and blunt political statement. As for the little room in...