For this 20th anniversary production, the play has found its perfect conduits in Corey Hawkins ( Straight Outta Compton, In the Heights) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (HBO's Watchmen, The Matrix Resurrections). And it requires two actors who can do its lyricism justice. Topdog/Underdog is the sound of the streets, the sound of hip-hop, the sound of Black poverty Black tragedy, and importantly, Black joy it's tough, it's gritty, it's lyrical, it's beautiful, it's poetry. But at the time of its debut, Topdog/Underdog was probably unlike anything the notoriously white Great White Way had heard before.

Visually, there's not much to the play it has one set, a studio apartment that doesn't even have a bathroom, and two characters. The off-Broadway production starred Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright, with the rapper Mos Def replacing Cheadle for the Broadway run.

Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog, but the play hasn't been produced on Broadway since then. Hello? Thereby telling her 3 things: 1) you got a phone, that is, you aint no smooth talking smooth dressing phoneless joe 2) that you is in possession of a telephone and a working telephone number which is to say that you got thuh cash and thuh wherewithal to acquire for yr self the worlds most revolutionary communication apparatus and you together enough to pay yr bills!īooth: You give her yr number you telling her that its cool to make contact if she should so please, that is, that you aint got no wife or wife approximation breathing down your neck to tough. Take for example this exchange between Booth and Lincoln over the importance of paying their phone bill:īooth: She gives you her number and she asks for yrs. Suzan-Lori Parks' words sing off the page. And for a play that's just two characters monologuing or arguing, while dealing with some heavy issues - race, class, trauma, murder - Top Dog is pretty damn funny.

If it were subtle, it would not be as watchable, or entertaining.

Top dog underdog review