The history of rivals
Funny, horrible, and ultimately
shattering, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, a drama
of way-inner-city life, won the Pulitzer Prize.
It’s a
downright showy play with extremely demanding movement and dialogue for two actors.
Shipping Dock’s intimate space is incapable of the grand setting Topdog/Underdog got in a big Broadway
theater, and that’s a plus. Benjamin K. Banks and B. Anthony Gibson play it out
in front of you, just feet away, and make it impossible to view with detachment
Parks’ powerful, poetic interplay between these supporting but competing
brothers.
We find
that their parents, who abandoned them when the brothers were children, may
have been prophetic in choosing the names Lincoln and Booth. Lincoln (Banks)
has found “legitimate” employment playing Abraham Lincoln in whiteface at a
kind of carnival entertainment where folks pay to shoot him as he pretends to
be watching a play. Booth (Gibson), his younger brother, refuses any employment
but steals food, clothing, furniture, etc. and shares his apartment, food, and
booze with his brother, whose paycheck pays the rent.
Some of the
backstory — via the brothers telling each other about their hardluck lives
— sounds unrealistic, but it seems that they each know some ugly details
about their parents that the other doesn’t. What unfolds in their history of
survival is the basis of their conflicts.
Parks’
poetry includes hip-hop language and lyrics but extends to their childhood
fantasies and even the patter for the con game known as Three Card Monte.
Lincoln was formerly a master of that con. Booth wants Lincoln to teach him,
but we see that Booth has no finesse or control. While Booth harbors smoldering
resentments, Lincoln’s pretended detachment doesn’t ring true, and we can’t be
sure how much either one fantasizes or even deliberately lies.
It’s good
to see Ben Banks back onstage; he’s one of Rochester’s most accomplished actors
and hasn’t been acting here for some time. His “moves” and insidiously hypnotic
patter with the card tricks are really convincing, and he gets inside this
complicated, layered role with no effort showing. Gibson, who started at
Shipping Dock when he was a teenager playing a pupil to Banks’ teacher, has
developed enough skill and presence to play this tricky duet as Banks’ equal.
This is a
play that audiences will want to cheer and argue about and will certainly
remember.
— Herbert M. Simpson
You should go if you
want to take advantage of the rare opportunity to see a complex,
Pulitzer-winning well-played on an intimate, local stage.
Topdog/UnderdogShipping Dock Theatre through October 16 | Visual Studies
Workshop, 31 Prince Street | $20-$22 | 232-2250,
www.shippingdocktheatre.org
Man on the street
Geva’s
season opener, The Road Home: Re-Membering America, is Marc Wolf’s one-man
show re-creating his road trip back to New York City from the West Coast just
after 9/11. An attractive and amusing performer, Wolf impersonates the men,
women, and children he met along the way, quoting from their responses to the
attacks on the World Trade Center and their comments on New York and the world
we now live in.
Although he
interviews people in the District of Columbia, Wolf makes no mention of the
attack on the Pentagon or any such 9/11 news outside New York. He doesn’t
really become the other people so much as suggest their voices and mannerisms.
For the most part their responses are, to put it mildly, uninspiring. Credit
Wolf with never sentimentalizing his subjects nor unkindly making fun of them.
They are varied but ordinary people whom he met from the Redwoods area of
Northern California to Nevada, San Diego, Mississippi, Memphis, Virginia, and
on up the coast to New York.
He does
create a few comic riffs with some of the characters he met, notably an
empty-headed young woman near the Mexican border and a rare, straight
Washington, D.C. hairdresser. Most seem predictably self-involved and only
peripherally interested in the terrible attack on New York. The one movingly
trenchant comment comes climactically from an architecture critic back in New
York City. Speaking of “the destruction of totems,” this man provides the title
of Wolf’s play by discussing what is needed for remembering, or more precisely,
“Re-Membering,” as opposed to dismemberment.
Director
David Schweizer and scenic designer Andrew Lieberman pattern the movement of
key props and projections that identify the places and speakers in order to
give what is essentially a monologue a sense of composition. And the journey is
both entertaining and minimally enlightening. But I can’t buy into the
concluding symbolic emphasis Wolf tries to place upon some “magic” beans a
little girl gives him to carry across the country. If, as he planned to, he did
plant them at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, I can’t think that such
lightweight material will grow to reveal giant anything.
— Herbert M. Simpson
You should go if you’re
looking for reflection on — not necessarily enlightenment of — the 9/11
attacks. Or if you’re interested in a world premiere from the man who turned
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into an Obie-winning play.
The Road Home:
Re-Membering America through October
16 | Nextstage at Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Boulevard | $12.50-$25 |
232-4382, www.gevatheatre.org
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.
