In 2018, the Times ran a list of the 25 best American plays since Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

In 2002, the play earned Parks the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making her the first Black woman to ever win that award. Topdog/Underdog first premiered Off Broadway at The Public Theater in 2001 before moving to Broadway in 2002, and it ran there for five months.

They always ask, 'Who the man? Who the man? I'm the man now! No, I'm the man!'' Throughout Topdog/Underdog, they talk about the tedium of their life and their attempts to let go of the past and move out of their current circumstances, but soon, their power struggle comes to a head and brings life-changing consequences. 'They're always trying to be the dominant person in the room. Booth tries to persuade Lincoln, who was once excellent at the game, to go back to it.īooth and Lincoln's dynamic is familiar to anyone who is a sibling. Booth, the younger brother, steals to get by, but dreams of becoming a three-card monte card shark. Now, Lincoln and Booth's parents have long abandoned them, and they live together in a boarding house. Their father, like the playwright herself, named them Lincoln and Booth as a joke. His younger brother is named Booth, after the man who actually shot President Abraham Lincoln. To me, it's funny.' She ran with it, making the character of Lincoln a Black man who works as a Lincoln impersonator at an arcade, where he has to pretend to die every time a customer 'shoots' Lincoln with a gun filled with a blank. 'I thought, 'Oh, man, I should just - that'd be cool, two brothers, Lincoln and Booth,'' she told The New York Times in 2001. Topdog/Underdog started out as a joke of a thought that came to Parks one day. Learn more about this acclaimed play's plot, characters, celebrity stars and more below. Their story is at once intimate and epic, showing how their troubled past shaped their present and asking whether they can pick themselves back up with each other's support - or else will be each other's downfall. Topdog/Underdog stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins as brothers: one named Lincoln, the other Booth. Now, the play is back for its 20th anniversary, with performances running through Januat the Golden Theatre. That conceit earned Parks a Pulitzer Prize and Tony nominations for its premiere Broadway production in 2002. A Black man working as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator may seem like a strange topic for a play, but Suzan-Lori Parks’s explosive Topdog/Underdog made a success of it.

Underdog broadway