Topdog/Underdog
Opening Night: October 20, 2022
Theater: Golden Theatre
Website: topdogunderdog.com
Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, names given to them as a joke by their father. Haunted by the past and their obsession with the street con game, three-card monte, the brothers come to learn the true nature of their history.
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October 20, 2022
Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning love letter to hustlers returns to Broadway in a powerful production. Although Topdog/Underdog premiered off-Broadway in a pre-9/11 United States, under Kenny Leon’s direction, this revival makes it look as if it were tailor-made for the era of betrayal and dissension we live in today.
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October 20, 2022
How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks’s fearlessness.
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October 20, 2022
Under the expert direction of Kenny Leon, the actors have made a delicious dance out of besting one another. Clawing intense audience laughter from Parks’ dark script, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen II are excellent students of “rep and rev” (repetition and revision), a technique that Parks — also a musician — borrows from jazz.
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October 20, 2022
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. 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.
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October 20, 2022
Regardless, the production excels in the sharp and textured interplay between Hawkins (restless, longing, cocky, hurt) and Abdul-Mateen (weathered, mature, guilty, smooth), in which comedy-laced routines eventually culminate in showdown and tragedy.
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October 20, 2022
Twenty years after it first arrived to shake up a complacent Broadway and make a Pulitzer Prize winner of its author Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog has lost none of its vitality and power and cunning. Director Kenny Leon proves that in a vibrant new production opening tonight at the Golden Theatre.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2022
Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century. And on Broadway, the director Kenny Leon has put this 2001 masterpiece back on a fresh, vital pedestal.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2022
For this harrowing and humorous two-hander to reach its full firepower, it takes actors equal in might. Director Kenny Leon has cast a pair of aces who consistently match each other across the tragicomic tone shifts.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2022
For this 20th anniversary production, the play has found its perfect conduits in Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton, In the Heights) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (HBO’s Watchmen, The Matrix Resurrections).
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October 20, 2022
Director Kenny Leon has helmed a sharp, focused revival of the 2002 drama, with a pair of cracking performances that never let up.
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October 20, 2022
Now the show is back on Broadway, opening Thursday at the Golden Theatre, where director Kenny Leon has orchestrated two riveting performances from young stars best known for their onscreen work: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen”) plays the older brother, Lincoln, a former street hustler with a demeaning and dead-end job as an Abe Lincoln impersonator in whiteface; while Corey Hawkins (“Straight Outta Compton”) is younger brother Booth, an unemployed man who gets by shoplifting his basic needs while yearning for his brother’s abandoned skills at three-card monte to make some real money.
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October 20, 2022
At some point during the more than 20 years since Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” made its debut, the play passed its sell-by date.
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October 20, 2022
Afro-pessimism isn’t a genre in which I’d usually place Parks, let alone Leon. But played without winking in a key of aggrieved, stressed-out toxic masculinity, as it is here, Topdog/Underdog is able to hit that note convincingly. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that this play had another card up its sleeve.
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October 20, 2022
The writing and direction are scythe-sharp and precise, and Hawkins’ and Abdul-Mateen’s are two superlative performances—for this critic, the standout of this current Broadway season so far: energetic, witty, mischievous, searing, tender, and vulnerable.
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October 20, 2022
What a thrill it is to be in the presence of Kenny Leon’s new revival at the Golden Theatre, where two exciting actors — Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II — are picking up the cards and giving us a singular night of theater.
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