What Is and What Aint: Topdog/Underdog and the American Hustle

Taking as a jumping off point the three-card monte dealer’s techniques in hustling a mark, this article’s examination of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog emphasizes exactly how Lincoln manipulates his younger brother, Booth. Attention to Lincoln’s methods reveals that he never intends to teach Booth the con; instead, he inflates Booth’s confidence in order to con his brother out of five-hundred dollars. Parks’s play is a biting critique of family in contemporary American society, exposing the breakdown of supposed unifiers like race and kinship. While the play is traditionally read as an “African-American drama” or “brother play,” this article suggests an alternative genealogy that includes Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and August Wilson’s Fences. Miller’s Biff and Happy became Wilson’s Lyons and Corey, and are now Parks’s Lincoln and Booth in a play that examines how the wounds of mid-twentieth-century socio-economic mendacity and inequality persist with increasing destructiveness in the present day.