A new revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ ‘Topdog/Underdog’ misses the beat at Pasadena Playhouse

A new revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog,” even one as tepid as the one at Pasadena Playhouse, provides an opportunity to reflect on the work’s strange, eventful history.

The play transformed the career of a playwright who, until that time, had been an Obie-decorated darling of New York’s downtown avant-garde. A writer of experimental collages on the manifold nature of the Black experience, Parks contended in a style guide to her tricky, unorthodox early work that “language is a physical act.”

And indeed, words in her plays have the force of whirling objects. From the start, her innovative thinking on form connected her more to the theatrical traditions of Adrienne Kennedy and Richard Foreman than those of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson.

Quite unexpectedly, “Topdog/Underdog” catapulted Parks to Broadway. When the play won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, she became the first Black woman to receive the award for drama. The glory hasn’t diminished in the intervening years. In 2018, a panel of New York Times critics, surveying the great works of American drama since Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” ranked “Topdog/Underdog” No. 1 on a list of 25 plays.

An interesting footnote to this illustrious history is that when the play had its premiere at New York’s Public Theater in 2001, there was great consternation in the downtown theater community that yet another Bob Dylan was going electric. How dare Parks dabble in discernible narrative! In the more rarefied reaches of this coterie world, the mainstream embrace of “Topdog/Underdog” implied selling out.

What was perhaps most ironic about this critique was that there’s such a clear throughline between “Topdog/Underdog” and its predecessors. The notion of a Black man impersonating Abraham Lincoln in an arcade inviting customers to take a shot at the president a la John Wilkes Booth — an audacious conceit of “Topdog/Underdog” — was tried out by Parks in “The America Play.”

Unquestionably, “Topdog/Underdog” has a more classical structure than Parks’ work up to that point. The play revolves around two modern-day brothers, Booth and Lincoln, whose fate may be determined by the names their profoundly neglectful parents saddled them with as a joke — a joke with an archetypal punchline.

But the play’s ferocious verbal music — the true engine of the drama — unmistakably bears the linguistic signature of Parks’ adventurous early plays, such as “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom” and “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.”

George C. Wolfe, who directed the off-Broadway and Broadway premieres of “Topdog/Underdog,” was an ideal interpreter at this stage of Parks’ career. A showman who, as the author of “The Colored Museum,” was fully at home in more abstract realms of playwriting, he knew how to balance radical theatricality with more conventional storytelling panache.

The enduring vibrancy of “Topdog/Underdog” was apparent to me in a 2012 South Coast Repertory revival that may not have retained the play’s syncopated rhythms but found enough jazz in the character dynamics to hold us under Parks’ spell. A critically heralded 2022 Broadway revival directed by Kenny Leon left little doubt about the play’s standing as a 21st century classic.

All of this brings me to the latest production, directed by Gregg T. Daniel, at Pasadena Playhouse. If I had never seen the play before, I might be questioning its pedigree. It’s a lesson in how even subtle miscalculations in casting and directing can distort one’s impression of a time-tested work.

I recall a starry revival of “A Doll’s House” many years ago that made me want to dismiss Ibsen’s play as creakily obsolete. But then not long after, I saw the astonishing 1997 Broadway production, directed by Anthony Page and starring a blazing Janet McTeer, that compelled me to reverse course and declare Ibsen’s drama an evergreen wonder.

Brandon Gill, left, and Brandon Micheal Hall in a scene from “Topdog/Underdog,” directed by Gregg T. Daniel.

(Jeff Lorch)

What went wrong at Pasadena Playhouse? Not the glorious physical production, which creates a theatrical world unto its own in a manner evocative of an American Beckett. Tesshi Nakagawa’s basement apartment set made me imagine an “Endgame” relocated to urban slum housing.

The superb lighting designer Jared A. Sayeg, who incidentally worked on Alan Mandell’s 2016 production of “Endgame” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, endows the scenic picture with a painterly aura. The visual precision lifts us into a heightened aesthetic realm beyond realism.

The setting simultaneously situates the play in a rich theatrical history. If Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot” is a forerunner of Parks’ creation, then Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” is a direct descendant.

But the production doesn’t live up to its three-dimensional canvas. Brandon Gill as Booth and Brandon Micheal Hall as Lincoln are talents of striking sensitivity. They bring a new generational sensibility to their characters, embodying a millennial version of Booth and Lincoln, a milder tack than the Gen X example of Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def, who starred in the Broadway premiere. (Wright played opposite Don Cheadle’s Booth in the play’s off-Broadway launch at the Public Theater.)

The actors tune into the traumatic history of the brothers but at the expense of the play’s theatricality. Abandoned at a young age by their parents, Booth and Lincoln are still stuck in survival mode. Their desperate living conditions — no bathroom in the unit and only one bed — are a constant reminder of their broken upbringing. But they act out their past more than they brood over it.

The apartment belongs to Booth, who doesn’t work and seems incapable of holding down a job. He’s practicing his slick three-card monte moves and patter, wanting to pick up his brother’s old line of work. Lincoln, who has been in limbo since his wife dumped him, is trying to hang on to his new job as a Lincoln impersonator at the arcade.

Pretending to get shot might not seem like a step up in employment, but Lincoln is relieved to be off the streets. Booth glamorizes the hustle, but Lincoln lived the dangers. He also appreciates being paid to sit around all day with his unsettled thoughts. He needs time to put himself back together, but time is a luxury these brothers have never been able to afford.

Gill underplays Booth’s mental challenges, perhaps forestalling a diagnosis that could make it easier for us to distance ourselves from the character. But there’s a tentativeness to the portrayal, a watering down of the fraternal volatility that ultimately makes Booth so dangerous.

Hall’s Lincoln wears a sweater in the play’s second half that looks like it came from Saks Fifth Avenue and doesn’t seem like the kind of item Booth would pick up on one of his shoplifting hauls. It’s the one noticeable design misstep in Daniel’s production, but it reflects the character’s desire to become part of a world that has always seemed ready to forsake him.

His three-card monte skills are storied in the neighborhood, but he’s determined to proceed down the straight and narrow. Lincoln’s trajectory is the mirror image of Booth’s, but eventually their paths tragically converge.

The psychology, however, needs to be more boldly theatricalized, and for Parks that inevitably means verbalized. These characters are fluent in three-card monte rap, no cards required. The plot is motored by their deft, defiant mouths.

But Daniel doesn’t draw from these fine actors the scale of performance that Parks’ drama demands. His restrained direction keeps the brothers in check and underpowered. Instead of a modern reworking of the Cain and Abel story, this revival offers something more subdued — a TV movie pleading for sympathy.