The hoariest cliche about the Civil War is that it was a war setting brother against brother. In Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks inflates and inverts and embodies this notion, and succeeds in bringing it back to life. By the time she's done, brotherhood is no longer a metaphor for war-war is the metaphor, with agonized murderous brotherhood the actual condition. Everything is upside down: Topdog/Underdog.
Parks accomplishes this reversal and reclaiming through a meta-fictional approach to what otherwise might be a classic kitchen-sink drama: two down-on-their-luck brothers share a flophouse room. One hustles for a living; the other used to, but now has a honest job. Each envies and despises the other. But there are no kitchen sinks in Parks' universe (literally-the characters repeatedly complain about the absence of plumbing): rather, her characters are living out a performance, and it's as stylized as Kabuki or Greek drama. The playwright drives her point home by naming the brothers Lincoln and Booth, and by giving Lincoln a job straight out of Robert Coover: sitting in an arcade dressed as his namesake so people can pretend to assassinate him. So this is not a suspense story: the question isn't whether Lincoln will die but how, and why. The men are Cain and Abel, of course, but also Jacob and Esau: each had an inheritance to save or waste, and they struggle over its remnants. And by putting Lincoln in white-face, Parks and director Amy Morton suggest that the brothers are one other famous pair as well: Mr. Bones and Mr. Interlocutor of minstrel-show fame whose jokes are all tired but whose routines are so scripted that they have no choice but to repeat them endlessly.
The key to making the play work is avoiding the temptation to be gritty: Parks is much closer to Albee than to Shepherd. This is not an expose of the desperate lives of the urban poor, but a social satire which at the end drops its playful mask and shows the costs of the self-hatred, loss and confusion it portrays. The Steppenwolf production is largely successful, with stellar performances from ensemble member K. Todd Freeman as Booth and Alley Theater resident company member David Rainey as Lincoln, and a sure directorial touch from Morton. It's not the actors' fault, or the director's, that a predominantly white audience is confused by a play featuring black people that doesn't make them supporting characters in a white world. So the laughs come in the wrong places, when Booth is masturbating or when he displays the results of a successful shoplifting expedition. Apparently even sophisticated white people don't know how to react to anything except the black people we've been programmed to see-crudely sexual, dishonest, violent.
Kudos to Steppenwolf for risking that sort of misunderstanding. It's been a while since an established Chicago theater has gotten out ahead of its audience. While putting up the winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize might seem like a bid for safety, doing a play that violates audience expectations is always a daring choice. Parks' play remains ahead of its time, and in producing it Steppenwolf returns to the avant-garde. Welcome home.