Review: Top Dog/Underdog by Viceroys
by Michael Meigs
Matthew Frazier and Jarrett King, the self-styled Viceroys, delivered to initiates and fans a four-performance in camara production of Suzan-Lori Parks' fascinatingly grim drama Topdog/Underdog during the final days of January. The studio theatre at the Salvage Vanguard, a close and dark little space with perhaps fifty seats, lent itself to the creation of the barren and junk-furnished squat shared by two brothers. Lincoln and Booth, so named by sardonic father and overwhelmed mother who abandoned them as youngsters, exist in a hell of poverty and dreams.
The three-card monte hustle is both a plot element and a metaphor for their broken existence. Lincoln was a fabulously successful con-man with that street hustle but abandoned it when a confederate was shot dead by rivals. His younger brother Booth has a head full of fantasies, including the ambition of using the game to achieve a dazzling change in his own life, luck and love. But Parks is dealing the cards, and there's not a winner anywhere on the table.
A plot summary might sound like a fantastical bad joke. Unless you willingly enter this stifling dead-end world you might not swallow the postulate that a black man named Lincoln is employed in a big city carnival booth to dress as Abraham Lincoln and wear white face makeup while passively sitting in a pretend theatre box gotten up so tourists can sneak up behind him, plant their feet in the designated marks on the floor and assassinate him with a fake pistol from the fun house. Or that he's about to lose his job to a wax dummy that's cheaper for the management.
Parks' talent is such that she makes that grotesque concept largely irrelevant, because Jarrett King as Lincoln could be employed in any other equally unskilled dead-end job. He could be a burger flipper, a garbage man or a collector of discarded cans and bottles. He's at the bottom of society, essentially homeless, trying to survive and maintain his dignity. Matthew Frazier as the younger brother is vain, volatile and demanding, scornful of a world that offers him no prospects.
The idiom is vivid and at times obscene, a battle between brothers who have no one else. The elder is focused and at times ponderous; the younger is flamboyant. One has been duped and betrayed by a wife; the other schemes to conquer Grace, a hot and juicy woman whose name is appropriately symbolic. The younger brother has a talent for 'boosting' -- stealing -- all sorts of goods, including, astonishingly, quality suits that fit perfectly despite King's impressive girth and Frazier's lean athletic build. Defeats accumulate, and the second-act downward spiral culminates in a duel of the cards murderously lost first by one and then by the other.
Director Jason Phelps knowledgeably calibrates the actions of these two forceful actors, pacing their trials and battles. Alyssa Dillard's subtle and unobtrusive sound design marks the pauses. The set by Eric Swabey-Keith is minimal but appropriate, establishing confines with peeling walls, suggesting exposed brick and offering the tawdry unconvincing eroticism of a pin-up calendar.
Endangered survivors, abandoned young, Booth and Lincoln, Cain and Abel -- pick your metaphor. Topdog/Underdog is an extended, harsh and convincing portrayal of the one percent -- not those on top, but those on the bottom. These two Viceroys are kings of finite space, bound in bad dreams, and they bring you along to experience them.
EXTRA
Click to view the program leaflet for Topdog/Underdog, a 'Made in the SVT' production
Top Dog/Underdog
by Suzan-Lori Parks
Viceroys
January 28 - January 31, 2016
Performances will take place at Salvage Vanguard Theater at 2803 East Manor Road, Austin, TX. Showtimes are Jan. 28 at 6 PM, Jan. 29 at 6 PM and 8 PM, Jan. 30 at 6 PM and 8 PM, Jan. 31 at 6 PM.
Tickets $11.24 via
