In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself – a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood (reviewed for ABR by Timothy J. Lynch) – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common purpose and continual progress’. The American story was, and is, a ‘blurring of history and folklore … [that] didn’t ask too many troubling questions’; The United States was, and is, a nation that ‘lives and contests its history’ with an unrivalled level of ‘passion and ferocity’.

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog (which had its première in 2001) is an ingenious disruption of the story America tells about who and what it is. If, as Bryant argues, the legends that America has written about itself are a means of papering over the cracks in its history – cracks precipitated by questions of race and class – then Topdog/Underdog subverts those legends, exposing the ever-widening fissures beneath.

Brothers Lincoln (Damon Manns) and Booth (Ras-Samuel) share a basement flat – all worn lino, make-do furniture, and broken-slatted walls (set and costume designer, Sophie Woodward) – in a tourist-rich American city. Naming two black boys after Abraham Lincoln, the revered American president who ended slavery (but whose somewhat indifferent attitudes towards Black Americans have been largely elided from the American story), and John Wilkes Booth, the president’s assassin, was, according to Lincoln, their drunken father’s idea of a joke.

Lincoln, once a street hustler, now works as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an amusement arcade. He sits all day while customers pay to pretend-shoot him in the back of the head. Booth, five years younger than Lincoln, is a petty criminal who wants to learn to play three-card monte, the hustle at which his brother excelled. Booth practises and practises, but has neither the skill nor the composure of his brother. He is desperate for Lincoln to teach him the game, for the two of them to work the streets together, but it is a life Lincoln refuses to go back to, not since the shooting death of one of his hustle crew.

Parks – one of the most influential playwrights of her generation but, outside of performance studies departments, little known in Australia – has written that Topdog/Underdog is a play about ‘family wounds and healing’. On one level, it is exactly that: a play that pivots around the relationship between two brothers, a relationship that is marked by hurt and betrayal, laughter, and love. But as its title suggests, Topdog/Underdog is also a play about the ways in which lives and histories cycle from dominance to despair, certainty to doubt, winner to loser, a notion stressed in the quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Circles’ essay that Parks includes as an epigraph to the play: ‘I am God in nature; / I am a weed by the wall’.

These cycles of existence, akin to depictions in art of the wheel of fate, are evident not just in the lives of Lincoln and Booth – in their relationship with each other and in their sense of their own identities – but also, as the play astutely realises, in the race thread that runs through the American narrative. As Bryant notes, ‘America’s racial history is littered with … instantaneous reversals’, including that of ‘Lincoln being assassinated just days after the guns fell silent at the end of the Civil War’. What makes this play so deserving of attention is the enigmatic way in which Parks intertwines this story of two brothers resisting, as best as they can, the fate that society and circumstances have reserved for them, with the story of America itself, demonstrating thereby the unresolved and seemingly unresolvable tensions that fatally entangle black and white narratives.

Damon Manns as Lincoln and Ras-Samuel as Booth (photograph by Sarah Walker)

First-time director Bert Labonté adroitly illuminates the various facets of Parks’s script without feeling to need to resolve its equivocations or pin down its metaphors. From the production’s thumping opening – Booth, all muscle and bravado, rehearsing his three-card monte routine – to the ghostly figure of Abraham Lincoln standing on the threshold of Booth’s flat, to the pietà-like tableau that marks the play’s final moment, Labonté’s direction is confident and astute. He trusts the material enough not to force it, letting the inherent drama of the play takes its own time to develop, and he makes efficient use of the thrust stage of the Lawler theatre, anchoring Lincoln at its centre while Booth stalks and struts around its edges. Mention should also be made here of the sound and lighting design (Dan West and Rachel Lee), which perfectly complements the subtleties of Labonté’s direction, both West and Lee working with largely muted, occasionally striking, variations of light and shade.

Labonté extracts two very fine performances from his actors, both Manns and Ras-Samuel finding the necessary nuance and interplay to reinforce the play’s inherent ambiguities. Manns brings to the role of Lincoln a sense of steadiness and hard-earned wisdom that contrasts with Das-Samuel’s twitchy, bellicose Booth. What Booth lacks in height (in a canny piece of casting, Lincoln towers over Booth) he makes up for in muscle and patter, yet Ras-Samuel brings to Booth an essential vulnerability, one which makes his cherishing of an ‘inheritance’ from his mother – just before she abandoned the boys when they were children, she gave Booth $500 wrapped in a stocking – all the more meaningful. As Lincoln, Manns embodies a corresponding uncertainty: are his claims of being happy working as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator (a ‘sit down job. With benefits’) expressions of satisfaction or resignation?

Crucially, both the acting and directing sustain the play’s central tension, a tension that derives from Chekhov’s assertion that you don’t put a loaded gun on stage if no one is going to fire it. One of the beauties of Topdog/Underdog is that Parks gives us both a literal gun – Booth brandishes a pistol as if it’s another appendage, an indispensable element of who he is – and a metaphorical gun. Embedded in the conceit of a character who is employed as a Lincoln impersonator, whose name is Lincoln, and who lives with a brother whose name is Booth is another ‘gun’, one that might, by the conclusion of the play, be fired – a fraternal re-enactment of the assassination of a president by a disgruntled actor. What both Parks’s script – and the perceptively modulated performances of Manns and Ras-Samuel – keep us guessing is whether the assassination will play out as foretold by history or whether that history will in some way be subverted.

At one point in the play, Lincoln notes that ‘People are funny about the Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.’ The play’s taut and devasting conclusion not only betrays the ragged and bloody edges of American history, it also reveals the ragged, bloody edges of the brothers’ interwoven narratives.

There are so many intricate elements to this play it is impossible to survey them all in the space of a single review. There is also something elusive about the ways in which these elements fit together. That they form a near-perfect whole is beyond doubt, but there is an almost quantum-level of uncertainty to them: just as one aspect of the play’s meaning seems to hold still long enough for you to grasp it, the others flicker out of your reach.

Parks interrogates the ghosts – black and white – that haunt the American story, as well as the nature of free will and the extent to which history, society, even our names, predetermine our paths towards the future. There is also the play-within-a-play that is at the structural core of Topdog/Underdog, the ever-present doubt as to who is the player and who is being played.

Fundamental to the dramaturgy of Topdog/Underdog is an examination of the degree to which, as Lincoln recognises, ‘the clothes make the man’. Identities and histories are, within the play, fashioned and fabricated. And even though Topdog/Underdog was first performed twenty-three years ago, it is difficult to listen to Lincoln’s observation that

I am uh brother playing Lincoln. Its uh stretch for anyones imagination. And it aint easy for me neither. Every day I put on that shit, I leave my own shit at the door and I put on that shit and I go out there and I make it work. I make it look easy but its hard. That shit is hard

without thinking of the 2009-17 presidency of Barack Obama. To what extent did Obama’s time in the White House parallel that of Lincoln impersonating ‘Honest Abe’ in an amusement arcade, a black man forced to wear – to bind himself within – a presidential suit cut and tailored for a white man? What sort of personal and moral sacrifices, what manner of compromises, must a black man make to preside over a system designed by America’s founding fathers to keep power in the hands of the few not the many, founding fathers for whom, as Bryant notes, ‘the notion of equality was outside their realm of thinking’? ‘No matter what you do you can’t get back to being what you was,’ Lincoln says. ‘Best you can do is just pretend to be yr old self.’

Topdog/Underdog might offer few answers to the perennial dilemmas of the United States, but the questions it poses will trouble you long after the final curtain.

Topdog/Underdog continues with Melbourne Theatre Company until 21 September 2024. Performance attended: 27 August.