Topdog/Underdog

Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks, premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2001 and opened on Broadway the following year. In 2002, the play earned Parks the distinction of becoming the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. Parks won a MacArthur Genius Grant the same year. Like most of Parks’s plays, such as The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire Universe (1990), Venus (1996), and Father Comes Home From the War, Parts 1, 2, & 3 (2015), Topdog/Underdog raises issues of racism in the United States and the construction of history and national identity. Lincoln, one of the main characters in Topdog/Underdog, evolved from the Foundling Father, a character in her 1994 work The America Play who is also a black Lincoln impersonator. 

As Parks describes in her introductory note to the Dramatist Play Service acting edition, “[t]his is a play about family wounds and healing. Welcome to the family” (4). The play takes place over the course of about a week. Lincoln and Booth, who are black, are brothers living together in Booth’s tiny apartment after Lincoln’s wife kicked him out.