TOPDOG/UNDERDOG by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Philip Akin, with Kevin Hanchard and Nigel Shawn Williams (Obsidian/Shaw). At the Theatre Centre (1087 Queen West). Opens tonight (Thursday, November 24) and runs to December 4, Tuesday-Saturday 7 pm, matinees Saturday-Sunday 2 pm. $20-$30. 416-538-0988. See listing.
Battling brothers go back at least as far as Cain and Abel, but you won’t find a more striking pair than the characters in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize winner Topdog/Underdog.
One of the black sibs, dressed in whiteface as Abraham Lincoln, works in an arcade where he’s shot over and over the other is doing his best to become a three-card monte hustler.
If that’s not bizarre enough, their long-gone, ironic father named the former Lincoln (maybe thus determining his later job) and the latter Booth.
“It’s one of the most fascinating plays I’ve ever worked on,” says Obsidian Theatre’s artistic director, Philip Akin, who staged the production at the Shaw Festival last summer after a 2010 workshop reading. “On the one hand, it’s about how these two brothers, left by their parents and forced to take care of each other, deal with the world and their relationship.
“But it’s also about what it means to be a black man. What does putting on whiteface do to Lincoln, how emasculating and destroying is that act? I think that he kills himself inside every day.”
Devoted to the parents who abandoned them, Lincoln was closer to their father and Booth to their mother.
“There isn’t a lot of crossover in the emotional links to the parents. Being left alone, first by one parent and then the other, is a profound event in their lives,” notes Akin, a fine actor as well as a director. “They’ve reacted differently, but the loss has poisoned their other relationships and the one between them.
“Each has been strange and secretive about how it’s affected him, but they also know they’re connected in a basic way. They need each other as much as they grate on each other.”
Parks’s plays have a musical quality, adds the director. It’s important to follow the way she’s written rests and beats into the text.
“The internal rests actually break up the scenes into sections. Other productions of the play, from what I’ve seen, handle the material too slowly. For us, the language is fast, and the text kicks in a staccato fashion.
“At times I feel that my work is like that of a conductor.”
Akin has found other potential challenges for the actors, who have to learn the patter of the monte and shift the three cards believably on the game’s traditional milk crate.
“And then there are jumps in logic that you can’t always understand at first. The shifts can be monumental, but there are so many different, delicate ways to play the script’s music.”
He’s set the piece in 1982, in part because the play’s language doesn’t hold up in 2011.
“The technology aspect of our world is different now, for one. Our designer, Camellia Koo, brought in a book called A Time Before Crack, a photo essay about black neighbourhoods before crack was a big thing. They were poor, but not devastated by drugs.
“The brothers, I’m sure, would have been influenced by crack, so I’ve set it just before that period. The sound design is old-school hip-hop, great to listen to.”
He stops for a second, a memory making him smile.
“I loved watching the traditional audiences at Shaw chair-dancing to the music.”
jonkap@nowtoronto.com
