'I See Thuh Black Card...'

Occasionally in the murky wasteland of Broadway, where nostalgia reigns and revivals rule, the hopeful theatergoer is led to an oasis advertised as fertile enough to water the desert. Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, which has just won the Pulitzer Prize, is one of these. Even if its success were to be

measured solely by the numbers of young people and black people, both young and old, in the audience on any given night, Topdog could be considered a healthy sign. Parks has been writing praise-winning plays since the 1980s, but Topdog, which premiered last year at the Public Theater, is the first one to make it to Broadway. For a play by Parks it is uncharacteristically conventional--a straightforward story with familiar characters that comes close to observing the classical unities. Her earlier plays, such as The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A and The American Play, are bold, disconcerting experiments in theatrical form. But Topdog is more remarkable in some ways because it unleashes the radical potential inside the well-made play.

Booth and Lincoln, two African-American brothers in their 30s, share an SRO where all the action takes place. The time is a few days in some city probably in the 1960s. The period, like the location, is deliberately vague enough to warn us off the issue beat. This is not social realism, even if it looks a little bit like it. Lincoln, the elder brother, was once a legendary three-card monte dealer. He left the game after his partner was shot, and has been working as a whiteface Abraham Lincoln impersonator in an arcade. Customers can re-enact the sixteenth President's last moments by stealing up behind the costumed Linc and firing a cap gun into his skull. Legitimate work, maybe, but humiliating from the point of view of little brother Booth, who hopes, with Lincoln's help, to get himself into the street game as a three-card dealer. He wants the women and the money and the props that come with a dealer's success. He can move his mouth and he can move his body. He's just no good moving his hands.

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