Topdog/Underdog

Suzan-Lori Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer for this play, and no wonder. A high-energy, laugh-out-loud tragedy, Topdog/Underdog is a very American play about very American issues: race, money, manhood. Family history -- abandoned children, brother against brother, the unsettled score with Mom and Dad -- emerges from under national history. Two black men, one named Lincoln and his younger brother, named Booth (Dad's idea of a joke), come to a conclusion as inevitable as it is troubling.

Lincoln is a former three-card monte hustler whose current job is to play Abraham Lincoln in an arcade: Strangers pay to assassinate him with a blank-shooting gun. Seth Gilliam, known to TV audiences from The Wire and Oz, will play Lincoln. Booth is sweeter, less educated, more violent, good at stealing, bad at cards. (He comes home wearing many layers of new, flash clothes: I stole and I stole generously.) Billoah Greene, who starred in the HBO film Brooklyn and was featured in Head of State, will play Booth. Leah C. Gardiner returns to her native Philadelphia for the first time to direct, having assisted George C. Wolfe on the premiere production at the Public Theater in New York; Topdog/Underdog later transferred to Broadway and then to London.

Topdog/Underdog, Oct. 10-Nov. 16, $30-$45, Philadelphia Theatre Co., Plays & Players Theater, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700.

—Toby Zinman

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