Review of TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
By: Jamie Henshaw
It would be foolish to try and steal another person’s money. Unless you have a partner who you trust to be equally untrustworthy. I heard once, or maybe I overheard, “Everyone is always trying to hustle another dollar off somebody; but in all, it’s the player’s responsibility to know what they’re getting into.” They either said “player’s” or “players’”, I never knew which; I should have asked, unless I wasn’t meant to hear those low-spoken words, because it really does make a big difference. I could ask Suzan-Lori Parks what she intended in TOPDOG/UNDERDOG, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning play that peers into the world of cheating, hustling, and the 3-Card Monte. The way I see it, we’re all players going about different games with different rules.
Parks’ work follows two grown black brothers Lincoln and Booth, whose names were chosen by their father as a joke, still living in the aftermath of their parents’ cheating, separation, and desertion. Too many, I’m sure, can personally relate to Lincoln’s interpretation, “I think there was something out there that they liked more than they liked us and for years they was struggling against moving toward that more liked something.” Desertion is a catalyst and we are the, sometimes combustible, chemicals. Lincoln, the older brother, lived a prosperous life of card hustling for years before another incident of loss set him straight. Booth steals everything he needs and wants and still he pursues Lincoln’s hidden secret to even faster money. They each play their games, their lies, their hustles, struggling to be the Top Dog, trying to move toward something better. The play progresses ingeniously as the characters, even those spoken of but never seen, hold their cards close to their chest, ante up, bluff, fold, and bet the house.
Resembling the Shell Game, it was the 3-Card Monte that Lincoln excelled at and which Booth naïvely seeks. Despite hints to the contrary from his brother, Booth thinks that this particular hustle can be won by being fast and lucky. But the game requires both a deceptive sleight of hand and an inside “Side Man” who knows where the right card is and can always pick the winner to make the target believe it is not only possible but easy. The dialogue between the brothers is more than just patter as they manipulate each other like cards and leave us to wonder who will be left with the deuce of spades, and who the deuce of hearts.
I don’t like to fall back on the argument that bad people are sometimes created, as some of their tendencies were surely learned from their parents who went so far as to use them as a sort of Side Man to hide adulterous cheating. It’s hardly just desserts that they are manipulated by the world around them as much as they seek to sleight the world because, well, we all know what “an eye for an eye” will do. But we must strive to be active learners; and sometimes that means putting the cards down and taking the wheel with both hands.
It would seem that Suzan-Lori Parks would tell me that it is the responsibility of all players to know what they are getting into. There is more at risk for the hustler than losing a day’s earnings on a slip-up. Playing the game can come with a sacrifice to morality. It can come from a naïve justification, but certainly is not innocent. As the younger brother, Booth, said, “Sometimes we will win, sometimes they will win.” A new question begins to emerge while the play draws deeper into the tension and anger of playing each other and of being played; What will be lost if “they” win?