Family ties Trinity Rep’s compelling Topdog/Underdog BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Topdog/Underdog By Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Kent Gash. With Joe Wilson, Jr. and Kes Khemnu. At Trinity Repertory Company through February 13.

Most of Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays are so in-your-face that you risk a nosebleed taking a seat. Plus, figuring out and following her baroque dramatic structures can require the attention it takes to defuse a bomb. Not so with Topdog/Underdog, a winning play beyond its 2002 Pulitzer victory. Accessible and funny as well as harrowing, this pulsating two-man drama unfolds a straightforward, realistic story with an avant-garde master’s savvy affection for resonant ambiguities.

Trinity Repertory Company makes the most of the opportunities — and then some — with a more-is-more set design by Eugene Lee uncharacteristically overwrought in the smaller downstairs theater. Director Kent Gash has coaxed four impressive performances from the two actors, who exchange roles in alternating productions. Joe Wilson, Jr. is memorable to Trinity audiences for his sassy zoot-suiter in Ain’t Misbehavin’ last fall, as is Kes Khemnu for Boy Willie in the 2001 production of The Piano Lesson.

Parks resurrected and reincarnated a character from The America Play: the Lincoln-obsessed Foundling Father, who in white-face and dressed as the president finds carnival work getting re-assassinated by customers. In Topdog/Underdog, Lincoln is the actual name of the black man who has that job at an arcade. For symmetry, his younger brother was named Booth by their father — ostensibly as a joke, but maybe for some other reason, as the playwright can’t resist inviting us to speculate.

Initially, the alpha wolf is the older and more competent Lincoln, but in their constant dominant/submissive dance, the dim-bulb Booth keeps trying to hip-check his brother into the shadows whenever he smells a weakness. The action takes place in Booth’s small tenement room, with bathroom and running water down the hall. No kitchen-sink family drama here. This production is hampered by the stage being enclosed in a wire mesh cube; the rats-in-cage visual metaphor is made needlessly explicit rather than simply suggested, which could have made stronger impact in our imaginations. But footlights in the cage do work as a life-as-stage reminder.

The play opens with Booth practicing three-card monte, haltingly. Lincoln had been on top of the world as a street-corner scam artist but quit when a partner was shot. Booth keeps begging Lincoln to teach him his moves, but big bro keeps trying to warn him away from that dangerous and soul-damaging life. Eventually we see that Lincoln is remorseful over having left the occasional tourist weeping in the street after losing his last dime. Parks doesn’t get all Kumbaya on us about this, establishing the concern just enough to place a better angel on his shoulder, for him to listen to or not.

That gives some direction to the sub-text of freedom, which this Lincoln would love to impart to his brother. African Americans with failed lives are historical heirs to internal slavery, Parks implies. While Lincoln feels free to take whatever work he can find, Booth feels diminished without skills or prospects: life is a zero-sum game that must be played so that others lose. After a weary life of hustling, Lincoln welcomes a job that has him sitting still all day, and he has the gritty poetry in him to slow down and appreciate "the smell of the ocean and cotton candy and rat shit." In contrast, Booth’s only pride of actual accomplishment, rather than just wishful aspiration, is his talent for shoplifting. He brags that he "stole generously" when he boosted a suit for his brother along with one for himself.

Booth’s real inheritance isn’t the $500 his mother left him, but rather the failures of both parents, who separately abandoned them as children. Lincoln, on the other hand, is holding onto their parents’ hopes, before they gave up, for keeping the family together. The American Dream for Booth is to lie and fantasize: about a perfect relationship with his beautiful off-and-on girlfriend Grace, about his future as a three-card monte ace.

Which version to see at Trinity? Khemnu’s Booth is more physically imposing, which brings an ironic poignancy to his shambling bear of a man. In that version, Wilson plays Lincoln a bit smugly, befitting the older brother’s superiority. But it was the other casting that got to me more deeply. Wilson’s Booth is less happy-go-lucky than Khemnu’s, although he turns up the sappiness a bit more, which could easily lessen our empathy. But by the end, Wilson has devolved Booth into a feral child, mean as a weasel. In apt counterpoint, Khemnu’s Lincoln has an imposing self-assurance that contrasts with flashes of sympathy and patience for his exasperating brother. In their fraternal dance of death, these two misbegotten halves of a whole person attain a kind of twisted grace.

This Trinity co-production originated at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, and travels on to the New Repertory Theatre in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts.