The first time I saw Susan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize–winning play Topdog/Underdog, it made me angry. This play won the Pulitzer? This play with its painfully obvious symbol-mongering, African-American brothers named Booth and Lincoln? Lincoln works costumed as Abraham Lincoln wearing whiteface and top hat in an arcade so customers can pretend to shoot him? He talks to himself, out loud, so we can get information? And so his younger brother, conveniently hidden, can overhear him? This is serious playwriting?

I next saw Topdog/Underdog in a student production. Yes, the characters certainly gave the students something to work with, and they could work with it well. I now saw moments, dramatically well written, that indicated playwright Parks might have some promise, even though the script gets repetitious and drags out a possibly decent one-act into two acts. I still had trouble getting over the flaws.

I next saw it in a professional production with two of our town’s top actors, Reginald Pierre as Lincoln and Chauncy Thomas as Booth. They convinced me that Topdog/Underdog is a very fine play, with strengths and depths that I missed when first seeing it. 

The current staging by Aquarian Rising Productions has completed my conversion.

Aquarian Rising is a fairly new company in what you might call St. Louis’s Off-Broadway theatre. The quality is very high. The dedication of those involved is strong. They are mostly African-American, and they play to that strength. They did a richly comic play written by one of their number, Gregory S. Carr, who directed Topdog/Underdog. Thomasina Clark, one of the best actors in St. Louis, designed the set and costumes. That meant several changes of clothes for both men. She also put the set in the chancel of the former German Lutheran church on South Jefferson, now the Jefferson Avenue Mission, which hosts a variety of events. Clark turned it into the small room rented by Booth (with bathroom down the hall), with a narrow bed for him and an old recliner for a bed for Lincoln, who has moved in with with his brother to save money; the Lincoln gig is not doing as well for him as the three-card monte. Nathan Obey did well designing lighting under difficult conditions, and Darrious Varner designed sound. Ronnie Brake is the efficient Stage Manager.

Without making a big deal of it, Jason Little’s Lincoln obviously considers himself the better of the two, older, smarter, more confident in his superiority. Jaz Tucker’s Booth recognizes his position and lives with it, though moments of resentment rise up, toward their mostly absent father, toward America’s racist society that has dealt him a bad hand, as well as toward his brother. Lincoln does try to coach Booth a little on his skill at three-card monte, but that is mostly a chance for Lincoln to display his own ability.  As the two men play together they build a fine rapport. Both characters have been carefully observed and are carefully presented.  

Aquarian Rising Productions has been choosing well in selecting plays it produces, and it has the chops to present them well. I look forward to more.

—Bob Wilcox

Photo by Darrious Varner
From the left, Jason Little as Lincoln and Jaz Tucker as Booth in Topdog/Underdog.