Both sides now Kent Gash helms Topdog/Underdog BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog pops off the page like a fistfight spilling out of a bar. So it should all but leap off the stage at us in its run at Trinity Repertory Company.

In the downstairs theater, Trinity newcomers Kes Khemnu and Joe Wilson Jr. will alternate in the roles of Lincoln and Booth. African-American brothers, the characters were named by a runaway father with a bitter sense of humor. The two-person play takes place in a rundown room in New York City, where their hand-to-mouth existence is currently tolerable because one of them has a job, dressing up to play his presidential namesake in an arcade where people pay to shoot him. Booth is practicing the three-card monte street scam, which Lincoln had worked masterfully until his partner was shot dead.

In its realistic presentation, this 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner was a stylistic departure for playwright Parks. Most of her 14 previous plays were known for their non-naturalistic techniques, such as using passages of language as code, and sometimes for their allegorical content, as those who saw the recent Brown University production of her 2000 Fucking A recall.

The Trinity staging is the middle stop of a co-production that began November 12 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and continues in February at the New Repertory Theatre in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. The actors are the same, of course, as is the set by Eugene Lee that suggests they are caged in.

The director is Kent Gash, whom Trinity theatergoers know from his production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ this season and From the Mississippi Delta back in 1994. Gash has worked extensively with musical theater and is co-author of the musical Langston in Harlem, which premiered this year at the Festival of New Musicals in Chicago. He spoke recently by phone from Atlanta about Topdog/Underdog.

Q: What’s your take on what the Pulitzer drama committee saw in this play?

A: Well, I think many things. Susan-Lori Parks has been evolving a very particular and vivid vocabulary and way of working and writing about the African-American experience for quite awhile. I think what the Pulitzer committee saw was a singular voice writing at the top of her game and perhaps her most synthesized and direct form. And the play turns on such classic things: on sibling rivalry, on trust, on betrayal, on truth and whose truth is the trump. I think it’s her at her very, very best. We all have been watching her career and her writing for many years. Some people felt she should’ve won it for The America Play, which is also a staggering piece of work.

Q: New Republic critic Robert Brustein praised Parks before Topdog by writing that she "values poetry over realism." But this is such a departure play for her, since it is realistic. Were there things she could accomplish only with this straightforward style — besides making it more commercially viable?

A: I’m not sure about that. Hard to say. She doesn’t strike me as the kind of playwright who’s ever writing just for commercial viability. It’s interesting that Brustein makes that comment. I think he may be misstating about the nature or use of language within the African-American community and vernacular — which is inherently poetic. And so what sounds like the valuing of poetry to the ears of Robert Brustein is in fact realism for us. And not being of the culture, I don’t think he gets that, frankly.

There are people who would quibble about whether or not Topdog is absolutely realistic. I do think it is a kind of heightened realism. I think of it as more of a poetic play, in part because its language is so powerful and so specific — the same way that I think of Tennessee Williams as poetic, or even Edward Albee.

Q: In your treatment of the play, was it an early decision to have the two actors alternate the roles? And how has that turned out?

A: It’s turned out extraordinarily well. It was an early thought that rolled around in my head, because when they were putting together the original production I know it was something that Suzan-Lori Parks and George Wolfe talked about. They didn’t do it because Jeffrey Wright was shooting Angels In America at the time and the scheduling just made it impossible. Also I think it’s the kind of thing you can only do if you have the right two actors. Luckily, I did have these two brothers who could do it and are extraordinary.

It’s also very empowering as an actor to do anything in rep. You think while you’re doing it: "This is completely impossible and my head’s going to explode off my body!" And then you do it. And by the time you finish, if you’re still standing, you come away feeling more empowered and more secure in your artistry than anything else you ever felt. I know that from having played rotating rep at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival as an actor.

Q: On the page the play reads like a series of Christmas presents for the actors and director — specifically where there are no stage directions but only the characters’ names alternating, where without words you can be inventive. Or did you feel that by specifying these opportunities, she was trying to do your job?

A: No, I didn’t feel she was trying to do my job. The script is always the raw material from which a production is created, and I always felt she was saying to us in these rests, in these pauses and breaks, that there’s a shift in the character’s emotional, spiritual or psychological geography, and if you observe the rest then the shift is allowed to occur. She’s not spelling out to us what the shift is, but if you look at the terrain before and after the shift, you know that change has occurred. If anything, that’s really helpful for the actors to be able to find their way.

Topdog/Underdog is at Trinity Repertory Company January 7 through February 13. Call (401) 351-4242.