The Theater of Hustle and the Hustle of Theater: Play, Player, and Played in Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle. So long, Red. —The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

None of Suzan-Lori Parks's plays is more highly regarded than Topdog/Underdog (2001), for which Parks became, in 2002, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Topdog features two characters, brothers named Lincoln and Booth, whose names prefigure the play's outcome and whose relationship drives its portrayal of "family wounds and healing."¹ Lincoln, the older brother, performs in a sideshow act where he impersonates his namesake, affording patrons the opportunity to play John Wilkes Booth, who was himself an actor, by reenacting the famous assassination at Ford's Theatre. One of Lincoln's regular customers adds a touch of philosophy to his part of the performance, whispering into Lincoln's right ear just before he shoots him in the left. As the brothers recount this episode, they split one of the play's most resonant and evocative lines:

Booth.

Whatd he say, that one time? "Yr only yrself—"

Lincoln.

"—when no ones watching," yeah.

(34)

The line is fitting inasmuch as it is shared: the two brothers divide it just as they divide their time on stage, alternating between topdog and underdog, player and played. The line is also fitting inasmuch as it is borrowed, originating not with either brother but rather with a shadowy figure, Lincoln's "Best Customer" (33). The very idea of an African American Abraham Lincoln impersonator, moreover, is one that Parks borrows from herself: one of her earlier works, The America Play (1994), features a similar, though not identical, character. Thus one gleans the many borrowings in Parks's work and the many plays within her plays.²

While such metatheatrical twists and turns are a hallmark of Parks's experimental style, they run counter to the content of the brothers' shared line, which implies a private, autonomous identity that emerges only in solitude—a concept distinctly out of place on Parks's stage, where it seems that one can only be oneself precisely when others are watching.³ In Topdog, as in her other works, Parks flaunts a concept of identity that is shared and borrowed, social and theatrical; identity is a role one performs publicly for an audience rather than a private essence one contains inside. The "Best Customer" implies, contrariwise, that identity is a matter more of authenticity than performativity, of signified ultimately trumping signifier. Such an understanding would corroborate the reception of Topdog as Parks's turn away from her signature postmodern metatheater to a more traditional naturalistic drama. However, if one suspects, as this essay suggests, that Lincoln's "Best Customer" is actually his brother, that it is Booth playing Booth to Lincoln's Lincoln, then the plays within Parks's play only proliferate in this line, whose performative utterance belies its denotative content. Perhaps even, or especially, that which appears most natural in Parks's play is a performance, or a hustle.

Topdog represents both an apex and a swerve in Parks's career, for just when it seemed that everyone was watching—the play not only landed Parks a Pulitzer, it also landed her on Broadway—Suzan-Lori Parks seemed not to be herself.⁴ Parks's early work audaciously breaks with traditional dramatic structure in order to explore the performativity of identity and the theatricality of history. If indeed her experimental style is "an acquired taste" (Bigsby 311), that may be because it presents what George C. Wolfe, who has directed a number of Parks's plays, including Topdog/ Underdog, describes as a "not-easy-to-digest vision of American history, black culture, the family" (qtd. in Als 79). Topdog, however, struck reviewers as more palatable, manifesting certain naturalistic features more reminiscent of a play such as A Raisin in the Sun than of some of Parks's earlier works. Set in a seedy boarding house room, Topdog explores the plight of African American males in conditions...