That curtain - a magisterial gold cloth - clues us into parts of the show’s purpose and intention, reflecting the promise and possibility of the outside world. In less assured hands, the production could get lost in Parks’ jazzy dialogue and structural sleights of hand, but Leon, with the help of his two stars, confidently steers the play until the final curtain. Their conversations - facetious, verbose, skittish - propel the narrative, reveal their personalities and betray their intentions. Lincoln ( Corey Hawkins) and Booth ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) are the only characters. The play, about two Black brothers wrestling with their history of parental abandonment and desire for economic stability, is airy and oblique. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins to Star in 'Topdog/Underdog' on Broadway This Fallĭirected by Kenny Leon (who nabbed a Tony in 2014 for his A Raisin in the Sun), Topdog/Underdog lays bare the push and pull of American aspirationalism. For that, there’s the 20th-anniversary Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog. Although these two plays are canonical studies of our nation’s vexing ideal, even they don’t quite capture the frenzied desperation of our calamitous present. At the Public Theater in New York, Robert O’Hara directs Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a work that examines the American Dream with a shrewd dubiousness, looking past the glamour to the festering sores. On Broadway, Miranda Cromwell, director of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, reintroduces the Lomans as a Black family - a change that complicates Willy (played by Wendell Pierce) and layers his tragic end. The mythical, unwieldy concept - marked by relentless striving and repeated heartbreak - is inherently Sisyphean, resembling our senseless approach to these times. With a recession on the horizon, a year of racial protests in the rearview and a pandemic still rippling and raging, it makes sense that this season’s theater revivals lurk and pace around the American Dream.
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