“In TOPDOG/UNDERDOG history screams and bleeds in this work of Parks’ as intensely as ever.”– Alisa Solomon, The Village Voice Its soul is nourished by the sad, shared loneliness and disappointment of this Black latter-day Booth and Lincoln, so named by their long-vanished father.”– Peter Marks, The Washington Post But the play is a more complicated and heartbreaking work. “ TOPDOG/UNDERDOG explores the multiple layers of sibling competition and intimacy - all that love wrapped in hate wrapped in love. Both a vivid, present-tense family portrait and an endlessly reverberating allegory, TOPDOG/UNDERDOG plies the fine theatrical art of deception to convey the dangers of role-playing in a society in which race is a performance and prison.”– Ben Brantley, The New York Times “TOPDOG/UNDERDOG is as exciting as any new play from a young American since Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Her voice is both idiosyncratic and eerily familiar, one of few in the popular theatre to fully exploit the power of spoken Black English.”- Hilton Als, The New Yorker “ A writer who crosses cultural boundaries, as well as social ones, she has had her work produced everywhere, from the smallest avant-garde stages to Broadway. She is an original whose fierce intelligence, and fearless approach to craft, subvert theatrical convention and produce a mature and inimitable art that is as exciting as it is fresh. “Suzan-Lori Parks is a remarkable playwright. Strictly Limited Engagement on Broadway This Fall But nothing here feels old.The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Masterpiece Returns to Broadway Leon threads a clever needle there: the visual and aural impact of Arnulfo Maldonado’s plushly bordered setting and Justin Ellington’s fused sound design are rooted in the play’s millennial era. There’s something few would have the guts to do now, even though Parks’ characters do not have to be race-specific, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has said several times.īut what makes Leon’s new staging notable is how he resists the temptation to bog down his production with the symbolism of Abraham Lincoln mythology, and any other such arcane academia, and focuses instead on making sure we believe that these vulnerable brothers truly exist, right there in the here and now of the United States of America, as Parks describes her physical and temporal settings.

I’ve seen “Topdog/Underdog” many times before, including, some 15 years ago, a fabulously daring Chicago pairing with Shepard’s similar “True West” wherein a pair of white actors swapped roles, night-by-night, with a pair of Black actors.

Underdog broadway