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Mazin Elsadig, standing, and Sébastien Heins in Topdog/Underdog.DAHLIA KATZ/Canadian Stage
Title: Topdog/Underdog
Written by: Suzan-Lori Parks
Director: Tawiah M’Carthy
Actors: Mazin Elsadig and Sébastien Heins
Company: Canadian Stage
Venue: Berkeley Street Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: To Oct. 15, 2023
To quote Shakespeare’s Juliet, what’s in a name? Quite a lot actually, if, as a perverse joke, your father named you after an assassinated U.S. president and your brother after his assassin.
Imagine how that might influence your fraternal relationship. Then also consider that the Lincoln and Booth of history were a pair of white men, one of whom emancipated African-American slaves, the other a supporter of slavery. You and your brother are Black.
There’s a lot to unpack in Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winner, which had an acclaimed 20th-anniversary revival on Broadway last year and now kicks off a new season at Canadian Stage. Her seminal two-hander is a complex riff on race, masculinity and sibling rivalry, which in Tawiah M’Carthy’s production is played like a slow, quietly haunting blues.
Parks adopts her historical conceit and then twists it: Where the assassin John Wilkes Booth was an actor, here it’s older brother Lincoln who acts – albeit, at the lowest level, playing his presidential namesake in whiteface at an arcade, where tourists pay to take a shot at him with cap pistols.
But it turns out younger brother Booth is acting too, putting up a false front of macho confidence to impress his sibling.
As the play’s title suggests, the two are locked in perpetual competition. When we first meet them, it seems that Booth (Mazin Elsadig) is the top dog. Lincoln (Sébastien Heins) has been forced to move into his brother’s one-room apartment after being kicked out by his wife. Not only has he taken that lowly arcade job, but to add to its indignity he’s paid less than if he were a white man.
Mazin Elsadig, left, and Sébastien Heins in Topdog/UnderdogDAHLIA KATZ/Canadian Stage
Booth, meanwhile, is boasting about how he and Grace, his “amazing” former girlfriend, are back together and planning to get married. Digging the knife in, he flaunts his sexual prowess – Lincoln’s inadequacy in that area being the ostensible reason that his own marriage failed. But still, it’s Linc who brings in the weekly paycheque that covers their expenses, while Booth is reduced to shoplifting and trying to master the con game of three-card monte – a hustle that his brother excelled at, before a violent turn of events scared him straight.
Over the course of her slow-burning play, which clocks in at close to three hours, Parks reveals the parental abandonment that disillusioned the brothers and the hunger for some kind of power and status that draws poor young Black men into a life of crime. That’s familiar territory now, but the playwright enriches it with poignant details. The brothers may fill their tiny apartment with the toxic fumes of braggadocio and locker-room talk, but they also keep an old family photo album, as if clinging to their lost boyhood.
There is comedy too. Elsadig is roguishly funny as the crude, cocky Booth. There’s a priceless scene early on where he does a silent strip-tease, delightedly peeling off the multiple layers of clothing that he’s lifted from a department store. Heins, meanwhile, gives Lincoln an air of cool superiority, undermined by a touch of absurdity – he’s in the habit of forgetting to remove his false beard after work.
The play is a showcase for the two Toronto actors. Elsadig builds on the “little bro” roles he previously portrayed in Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over for Obsidian Theatre and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size at Soulpepper – two works that owe a debt to Parks. His Booth is, for all his comical swagger, a sad and desperate figure battling a sense of inadequacy in the shadow of his brother.
Heins, best known for his immersive work with Outside the March, takes on perhaps his most substantial dramatic role to date. Early on, his Lincoln is restrained and frustrated, fretting about the potential loss of his job – his boss is thinking of cutting costs by replacing him with a wax dummy – and seeking solace by picking out blues numbers on his guitar. When he ultimately resumes his life of crime, he comes alive, and Heins sizzles with excitement in a simultaneously exhilarating and horrifying monologue, where Lincoln revels in his card-sharping skills even as he acknowledges the devastation of the poor suckers that he’s fleeced.
It’s only in the play’s final – and, given the Lincoln-Booth theme, perhaps inevitable – climax that both actors don’t quite deliver the emotional punch to make it hit home.
That’s partly the fault of director M’Carthy’s low-key tone, which gradually moves from moody to menacing but remains subtle to the end. That said, I did enjoy its striking contrast to Fairview, the meta-theatrical satire of grotesque racism which he directed at Canadian Stage last season.
Topdog/Underdog on the other hand is grimly realistic, located here on a dingy apartment set designed by Rachel Forbes that speaks of poverty, with milk crates supplementing the few sticks of furniture. It’s tucked into a corner of the Berkeley Theatre’s downstairs stage and partly roped in with fences, as if we were looking into a prison. Jareth Li bathes it in eerie lighting and Stephen Surlin surrounds it with an increasingly disturbing sound design.
I regret that I didn’t catch Parks’s play when it had its only other professional Toronto staging, a 2011 Shaw Festival-Obsidian co-production at the Theatre Centre. It’s a major work by a major American playwright and, reservations aside, it shouldn’t be missed this time around.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)