![]() ![]() They share cramped quarters in a rooming house, where their rivalry and reliance on each other ricochet off the walls. It’s easy to read the two brothers, named Lincoln and Booth in a mordant joke by parents who abandoned them, as allegories. Under the direction of Kenny Leon, this production fills them with swagger and heart. On the page, Parks is known for her liberal, almost sculptural, use of blank space. It’s also loose-limbed and funny and magnetically entertaining, a slow-burning display of dramatic fireworks. The 2001 play, for which Parks became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, has attained a towering stature in American letters over the past two decades, inspiring a generation of dramatists wrestling with race, capitalism, and their blood-stained roots in our country’s history. ![]() Throw in career-high performances from Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and it is a theatrical event in the most essential sense, in that it demands to be seen here and now. ![]() The first Broadway revival, which opened at the Golden Theatre tonight, crackles like a live wire - an American fable with its finger shoved in a socket. It is a testament to the acuity of Suzan-Lori Parks’ imagination and powers of perception that “ Topdog/Underdog” feels as vital and electric today as it did 20 years ago. ![]()
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