Review: Top Dog/Underdog by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs

You have missed an extraordinary experience.  Almost all of you.  Lisa Jordan's staging of Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks takes place this evening and then three more times, and then it's gone forever.

 

Yes, I didn't get to the City Theatre production until late in the run.  That wasn't willful neglect but just a queueing problem.  I have a season ticket to the City, but there is so much theatre in Austin, much of it unusual, innovative or of high quality, or all three.  And ALT is just me, trying to feast beyond reason on all that art.

 

McArthur Moore and Richard Rashad Romeo appeared together at the City two years ago under Jordan's direction in August Wilson's Fences.  That was a graceful, moving ensemble production.  In this very contemporary underclass drama by Parks, they constitute a world of their own in which each is a burning pole of energy.

 

You should recognize the playwright's name.  Suzan-Lori Parks has been flirting with Austin via the Zach Theatre.  She has come to town twice for a curious Watch Me Work event there, during which she's on view to the audience for forty minutes or so and then conducts a Q&A.  She will direct her Book of Grace for the Zach, running June 2 - July 10.  She was a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" back in 2001 and went big time in 2002 when Topdog/Underdog ran Off-Broadway, then on Broadway and won the Pulitzer prize for drama.

 

 

McArthur Moore, Richard Romeo (image: Andy Berkovsky)
 
 
Two brothers, Lincoln and Booth.  They're surviving rather than living, in some big city.  Richard Romeo is Linc, the elder, the top dog, employed in a ghastly funhouse gallery to play Abraham Lincoln for tourists who pretend to be John Wilkes Booth and assassinate him.  It's a job.  He gives his effort to the weirdness of it, wearing whiteface makeup, a floppy top hat and a beard, practicing the contortions and convulsions of the assassinated president.  He used to be a con-man, a consummate three-car-monte prestidigitator but he abandoned that when a fellow hustler got shot.

 

Romeo is tall, tense and cerebral.  McArthur Moore as his younger brother Booth is a bouncy, jivy, arrogant womanizer who dreams of dazzling the marks in the three-card-monte scam.  He calls himself "Three-Card."  Booth is not very smart but he's impulsive and vulnerable.   Moore combines a physicality and a tight-as-a-high-tension-wire awareness that irresisitibly draw one's attention.

 

Throughout the piece the younger brother pushes and cajoles older brother back toward the dangerous obsession of the card game.  They work that card display over and over again.  After you hear the patter, witness the eye-blurring card work and hear the commentary, you'll never again be tempted to try to pick out the right card.

 

Parks writes pungent, stinging, singing dialogue and these two actors make the most of it.

 

Lincoln loses his job when the management decides to replace him with a wax dummy.  Booth closes in on his dream of marrying his girlfriend.  The action in Andy Berkovsky's tattered, littered set thrums with energy and we know that they are heading for confrontation.

 

Topdog/Underdog is a gritty, memorable and frightening exerience.  You won't see better or more intense ensemble playing in Austin this season.

  

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, February 22

Review by webmaster, TheatreAustin, Yahoo groups, February 26

 

EXTRAS

Click to view program for Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks at the City Theatre

 

Suzan-Lori Parks talks about Topdog/Underdog and 365 Plays/365Days

 

(found at www.zachtheatre.org)

 

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Top Dog/Underdog
by Suzan-Lori Parks
City Theatre Company

February 17 - March 16, 2011
City Theatre
3823 Airport Boulevard
Austin, TX, 78722