Critical Evaluation

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In 2001, Suzan-Lori Parks was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation as a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius award). Topdog/Underdog was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in drama, making Parks the first African American woman to be so honored. Her work continues to place her at the forefront of the American theater, as she continues to develop haunting plays for the stage.

Parks in Topdog/Underdog tells her most linear story in a traditional way. In her earlier work—including Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (pr. 1989, pb. 1995) and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (pr., pb. 1990)—she explodes dramatic traditions. The tradition of providing a play with a beginning, middle, and end makes its way into her later works, such as In the Blood (pr. 1999, pb. 2000) and Fucking A (pr. 2000, pb. 2001), and is firmly realized in Topdog/Underdog. In her essay “Elements of Style” (1995), Parks writes I don’t explode the form because I find traditional plays “boring”—I don’t really. It’s just that those structures never could accommodate the figures which take up residence inside me.

Even though Lincoln, the older brother and so-called topdog, bears a connection to The Founding Father in The America Play (pr. 1993, pb. 1995), in that both are presidential impersonators at a side show, the resemblance goes no further than the choice of career. Lincoln is a fully realized human being, not a vestige or emblem. By the same token, Booth bears some resemblance to Monster, Hester’s illegitimate son in Fucking A, but Parks’s “underdog” perpetrates evil actions because he is far too human, rather than a monster who defies all humanity. It is logical, then, for Topdog/Underdog to take a more traditional form than Parks’s earlier works.

Thus, Parks in this play moved away from her earlier experiments to explore the possibilities of traditional drama. However, in an interview included in the hour-long documentary The Topdog Diaries (2002), Parks states that the idea of her play being traditional is an illusion, that in fact the structure of the drama is similar to the card game, three-card monte: It is never really what it appears to be. In this sense, the hustling that Parks includes inside the drama continues into the audience and beyond: The audience and its reaction are part of the con game that the playwright employs as a dramatic technique.

As in her earlier works, Parks continues in Topdog/Underdog to use preexistent motifs as the root of her storytelling. In In the Blood and Fucking A, she turns to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), using the original as an impulse to explore contemporary matters such as welfare, evangelical religion, and abortion. In Topdog/Underdog, she turns to the Bible and the ageless myth of Cain and Abel. She also echoes one of the themes found in Sam Shepard’s dramas, such as True West (pr. 1980, pb. 1981) and The Late Henry Moss (pr. 2000, pb. 2002): two brothers warring over the past, through the present, and into the future.

In each case, Parks makes the subject uniquely her own. Just as Hester Prynne from Hawthorne’s nineteenth century American masterpiece is echoed in the aforementioned plays, Cain and Abel and their mythic relationship are mere echoes in Topdog/Underdog. More relevant to an analysis of the play are the direct and unrelenting historical references to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The irony of having an African American, the progeny of slavery, putting on white-face make-up and reenacting the death of the American president who...

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abolished slavery nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier is not lost on the audiences who witness the play. That Lincoln is unable to escape his fate (Booth must pull the trigger) is reflective of the statement by the topdog in the play that no one can win at three-card monte, the other over-arching metaphor that defines Parks’s drama.

A few of the “contemporary matters” that Parks addresses in the play are the inevitability of violence, the destructive impact of unrelenting poverty, the futility such poverty perpetrates, the barrenness of failure, and the fact that history will repeat itself in spite of all efforts to prevent it from doing so. These matters not only define the work but also provide audiences with opportunities for significant personal thought following the final curtain. Topdog/Underdog, like Parks’s other plays, is not an easy work to experience. It forces audiences to enter a world that most would prefer to avoid and perhaps deny.

Parks does not allow her audiences to take a relaxing journey; instead, she prods them with a mixture of humor and horror. The relationship between the two brothers is such that viewers of the play are provoked to laughter even as they prepare themselves for the disasters that are promised to come. The issues that propel Topdog/Underdog forward are found in most if not all of Parks’s works for the stage, and, as a consequence, she has created for herself a position in contemporary theatrical studies that carries with it an expectation for moving, thought-provoking experiences.

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