Convinced his cost-cutting bosses will replace him (how’s that for an evergreen subject), Lincoln exaggeratedly polishes Honest Abe’s death scene to grin-inducing effect. But Parks pulls spiky laughs from the bleak circumstances. It’s a job out of a strange nightmare – if not the musical Assassins. He wears whiteface and a ratty frock beard, frock coat, and top hat to pose as Abraham Lincoln in an arcade, where people pay money to pretend to kill the 16th president. Since quitting the con and getting kicked to the curb by his wife – a crushing blow that involved Booth – Lincoln has made a living by dying. Booth wants to team up in the scam with Lincoln, a former badass at “throwing cards.” He needs cash to win over Grace, a woman this dreamer-schemer claims loves him, “but she don’t know it yet.” He clumsily rehearses moves and patter for three-card Monte on an improvised table of milk crates and cardboard. But beyond its walls are visible swoops of gold drapery, suggesting something less realistic, somewhere shiny and out of reach.īooth squeaks by from what he can “boost.” He’s convinced con games are the way to economic opportunity and a step up from shoplifting. The depiction of Booth’s residence, a room in an urban boarding house, is down-to-earth in its claustrophobic shabbiness.

Those narrative details manage to be both specific and all over the map.Īrnulfo Maldonado's set also goes more than one way. The setting, according to the program, is here, and the time is now. And Corey Hawkins, a Tony nominee for Six Degrees of Separation, gives a star turn that’s persuasively measured and lived-in as big brother Lincoln.īeyond their ripely symbolic, larger-than-life names, these young Black men share traumatic histories (“raggedy recollections,” as one puts it), uncertain futures, and inevitable fates. He nails the recklessness - and in the end, raw sorrow - of the brash younger brother. Director Kenny Leon has cast a pair of aces who consistently match each other across the tragicomic tone shifts.īroadway rookie Yahya Abdul-Mateen II went nude in his Emmy-winning Watchmen role, but he’s never been more emotionally naked than in his performance as Booth. Someone’s always got more of it, and that disparity breeds trouble.įor this harrowing and humorous two-hander to reach its full firepower, it takes actors equal in might. At its core – and right there in the title – the play also concerns power. The always intriguing playwright reckons with race, identity, fractured families, and the elusive chase for grace. Back on Broadway in a top-notch new production, Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, Topdog/Underdog, bubbles over with timeless talking points.

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