A Top-Notch “Topdog”

On my very first business trip to New York City, in my early 20s, I was fortunate enough to be the victim of a classic three-card monte sidewalk card-shuffling scam that cost me 20 bucks and a much-anticipated stop at Grey’s Papaya for lunch.  Why “fortunate”?  Because it taught me a few very valuable lessons: Con artists have already figured out all of the possible angles, and not one of those angles ever includes you, the mark; the hand is always faster than the eye; greed and overconfidence (the source of the prefix “con” in the phrase “con artist”) will cause you to lose, at the very least, a hot dog and papaya juice lunch and, at the very most, your life savings; and the guy in the crowd who just “won” 100 bucks before your turn is the “shill,” a friend, or a cousin, or a brother, of the card thrower himself.

Suzan Lori-Parks’ 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander play, Topdog/Underdog, now in an excellent new production by Invictus Theatre at the Windy City Playhouse, is about just such a three-card monte dealer and his brother, living in too-close quarters in a rooming house that’s probably in New York, though Parks never specifies the location.  (Are there three-card Monte games or similar shell games on the streets of Toledo, Ohio?)  It is about brotherly love and, far more crucially, brotherly hate.  And, most of all — and, in this sense, very much like virtually any dramatic play one could name — it is about buried secrets and one secret in particular that Parks hides until the very end of the play like the pea in the shell game.  

The brothers in question are named “Lincoln” and “Booth” — a cruel joke by their father and a mordant but significant one by the playwright.  Lincoln (Mikha’el Amin), the older brother and “top dog” of the title, is a former three-card Monte master and now an Abraham Lincoln impersonator in an arcade, complete with whiteface and top hat.  

Booth (DeMorris Burrows), the underdog, is ambiguously unemployed, and attempts to impress women with his shoplifting skills — “I stole, and I stole generously,” he says.  Still, it is Booth who has taken Lincoln in after his big brother has had an argument with his wife, and who attempts to draw Lincoln back into his street hustle and to learn its subtle secrets himself.  Lincoln resists; he calls his brother “a double left-handed motherfucker who don’t stand a chance in all get out out there throwing no cards.”

The names of these two brothers, and the presence of a certain Chekhovian device at the beginning of the play, and a disputed inheritance, are about all you need to know about the broad strokes of the plot, without giving too much away.  In its playing out, the story, directed by Aaron Reese Boseman, is an intense one, but far more intense is the language itself — fierce, fast-paced, and funny, with an inherent playfulness to the dialogue that drove me to buy a paperback version of the play after seeing the Invictus production.  If you enjoy David Mamet’s early plays — American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and the like — about hustlers, low-lifes and fast-talkers, with their sure-handed grasp of the rhythms and argot of the urban demotic, you will find Topdog/Underdog to be a deserving successor.  

Consider the following monologue from Lincoln, occurring mid-point in the play:

“Like that joker and his wife from out of town.  Always wanted to see the big city.  I said you could see the bigger end of the big city with a little more cash.  And if they was fast enough, faster than me, and here I slowed my moves I slowed them way down and my Lonny, my right hand, my Stickman, Lonny could draw a customer in like nothing else, Lonny could draw a fly from fresh shit, he could draw Adam outa Eve just with that look he had, Lonny always got folks playing…

“We took that man and his wife for hundreds.  No, thousands.  We took them for everything they had and everything they ever wanted to have.  We took a father for the money he was gonna get his kids new bike with and he cried in the street while we vanished….Greedy.  Thinking they could take me and they got took instead.”

The rooming house set — a very grungy and effective design — is by Jeff Award winner Kevin Rolf.  Marquecia Jordan designed the costumes, which match the set perfectly in their shabby and rumpled ordinariness.  The “cardistry consultant” is the Chicago actor Keenan Odenkirk; I happened to eavesdrop on him in the lobby after the play and picked up some valuable tips on how not to lose money if I ever play three-card monte again or, more accurately, how to understand the methods and techniques by which I inevitably will lose money again.  For a far better investment of your money and time, secure yourself a ticket to this impressive production before it vanishes.  

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented through March 31 by Invictus Theatre at Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park Rd.

Tickets are available at invictustheatreco.com.

Additional information about this and other area shows may be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.