NEW YORK — Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” is a phenomenal two-brother drama, every bit as intense and rich as anything by Sam Shepard and, frankly, as good an American play as most anything written during the last quarter century. And on Broadway, the director Kenny Leon has put this 2001 masterpiece back on a fresh, vital pedestal.
The experience at the Golden Theatre as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins smash each other into psychological pieces is at once retro and prescient. When you can pull yourself out of the narrative action, which is not easy to do here, you realize that Parks was anticipating all kinds of stuff that was about to happen in America.
I’ve seen “Topdog/Underdog” many times before, including, some 15 years ago, a fabulously daring Chicago pairing with Shepard’s similar “True West” wherein a pair of white actors swapped roles, night-by-night, with a pair of Black actors. There’s something few would have the guts to do now, even though Parks’ characters do not have to be race-specific, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has said several times.
