DEALING IN IDENTITY
Sibling rivalry at play’s core
When: To Feb. 11
Where: BMO Theatre Centre, Vancouver
Tickets/info: From $29 at artsclub.com
The United States is a nation built on mythologies, and some of the best American plays have tried to get at those myths by combining brawling domestic realism with broad national allegory.
I’m thinking of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where the couple in vicious combat have the names of the first American president and his wife. Or the battling brothers embodying America’s frontier mythology in Sam Shepard’s True West. Or David Mamet’s American Buffalo with its lacerating take on barefisted Yankee capitalism.
Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog echoes its predecessors from a contemporary African-American perspective. An intense, hypnotic blues play about a pair of brothers locked in mortal combat, it operates on multiple levels, telling a story about sibling rivalry and a culture at war with itself.
Dean Paul Gibson’s exquisite Arts Club production features superb performances from Michael Blake and Luc Roderique as brothers Lincoln and Booth. Their father gave them those names as a joke: the American president who freed the slaves and the actor who assassinated him. They live together in Booth’s shabby one-room inner-city apartment, designed with gritty detail by Shizuka Kai.
Booth is a shoplifter who dreams of becoming a scam artist. He wants to master three-card monte, the card game with which Lincoln once ruled the streets, ripping off suckers for cash.
Lincoln quit that game after his partner was killed. Now he works at an arcade, dressed as Abe Lincoln in long black coat, top hat, beard and whiteface makeup. People pay to pretend they’re John Wilkes Booth and shoot him with blanks.
The brothers engage in a kind of gut-level one-upmanship, as the title suggests, competing to see who will be top dog between them. Booth constantly needs to prove himself and his masculinity, often at Lincoln’s expense. He’s generally the aggressor, though they reverse roles for a while in Act 2.
But the binary in the title also points to the cultural allegory. Every top dog must have an underdog, and black people have always played that role in the story of America. Lincoln and Booth are brothers by blood, but also in the black vernacular sense. While the white man rips them off (as we learn about Lincoln’s job), they fight each other for the scraps.
In their desperation to make it, to live the perverted American dream, they also inadvertently destroy their own community. Lincoln boasts that his threecard monte scam took a couple’s life savings and someone’s welfare money. Booth has an offstage romance with a woman named Grace — Amazing Grace, the brothers call her — who gets caught up in their misogyny and self-victimization.
The acting is superb. Roderique’s angry, restless, explosive Booth beautifully complements Blake’s smooth, contained Lincoln, the older brother who seems more sensible and controlled. Blake’s demonstration of Lincoln’s skill with the cards, accompanied by a repetitive verbal chant, is mesmerizing.
But the card shark role proves to be no more functional than Lincoln’s grotesque performance of Honest Abe. The characters constantly change their clothes (credit Carmen Alatorre’s easy on-off suits), but they can’t change their underlying reality.
Abraham Lincoln may have ended slavery and Barack Obama become president, but emancipation remains a distant dream for these black men.