Patrons pay to shoot this Black man in whiteface. Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, returns to Broadway for its 20th Anniversary Production.Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, names given to them as a joke by their father. The top hat and long coat are more customary and less cosplay since Link is employed as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at a local arcade. That older brother is Lincoln (“Link”), who enters the room abruptly dressed as his namesake: Abraham Lincoln. Booth is a little hectic with his hands (a recurring theme) but takes a measured approach to the ritual: throwing the playing cards, running from pretend police and even threatening an invisible “mark” (scam victim) not to touch his cards - as he has heard his older brother do several times. When we enter the story within “Topdog/Underdog,” Booth, the younger of the two siblings central to the text, sloppily practices a three-card-monte scam in his bedroom. His murderer? A member of the same gang Hussle formerly ran with. Josh Groban, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In 2019, Hussle - a Crenshaw-born, community-oriented rapper and entrepreneur - was gunned down outside his clothing store in South LA. House lights fade to the song “Grinding All My Life” by Nipsey Hussle. “Topdog/Underdog” tells on itself before the curtain rises in the first scene.
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