Sorry for the late post playwrights! I was on the road yesterday and returned home to find my Internet was down.
It’s time to talk about the second play on our reading list for the month, Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for this play in 2002. The committee described the play as follows:
“A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, Topdog/Underdog tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names, given to them as a joke, foretell a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by their past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.”
The play takes place in Booth’s cramped apartment, where Lincoln has come to live because his wife kicked him out for cheating. Lincoln, an ex-card sharp who “swore off thuh cards,” dons white face makeup to take a job as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade, where tourists pay money to shoot him. Booth, determined to learn his brother’s former trade, doesn’t seem to have what it takes to be a hustler and instead resorts to shoplifting to survive. The two reminisce about their childhood and share their memories of when, as teenagers, their parents left them to find their own way in the world. One minute they give each other heartfelt career advice, the next they insult each other as only brothers can. The tensions between them build to a tragic climax.
The play is about what it means to be family and what it means to be a black man in America. It is about struggling through life, but with someone else, not alone. Parks has also said it is about “who the world thinks you’re going to be, and how you struggle with that.”
One Thing (Okay, Two Things) I Noticed: Parks uses the simple stage direction “(rest),” to indicate a pause in a character’s speech, but she also quite often will just list the character’s names, one after the other, as if they are going to give a line of dialogue but then don’t. It’s almost as if the characters are tossing the awkward silence back and forth between them like a ball. She also sometimes has the characters deliver a shared line together. As she explains in this great interview in The Interval–which is chock full of insights on the craft of playwriting and the author’s creative process—she sometimes makes the decision to do this when she is revising a play for a new production.
One Idea: Write a play in which two or more characters come and go from a central “home base”: roommates coming and going from their apartment, co-workers with back-to-back shifts, a courier making daily deliveries. Have the story unfold as the characters relate to each other what has taken place in the outside world since their last meeting. Let what they choose to reveal and how they reveal it expose the nature of their relationship.