THEATRE REVIEW:
TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
8 AUG/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 5/5

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE It is, at first blush, most definitely not the kind of theatre one might expect to find on the boards in this quaint little bastion of white upper-middle class complacency. But then again, for the past 50 summers, the stages of the Shaw Festival have often given themselves over to ideas and plays that were considered shocking and controversial — at least when they first hit the stage.

But in programming her new Studio Theatre over the last several years, artistic director Jackie Maxwell has played up the controversy by ensuring Topdog/Underdog hits the stage well before its best-before date has passed. And even by those lights, Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer Prize-winner is so fresh that it is still steaming, despite the fact that it premièred in 2001 — a heaping theatrical plate of viscera, still pulsing with life, ripped from the underbelly of America and served up whole for audiences largely unaccustomed to its cadences and flavours.

It is, needless to say, rich fare. Set in a single room in a squalid boarding house in an unnamed American city, it is the tale of two brothers seemingly trapped in a downward spiral since birth, when their father, in a fit of macabre whimsy, decided to name his black sons Lincoln (played by Nigel Shawn Williams) and Booth (played by Kevin Hanchard). Having been abandoned by both their parents at a young age, the brothers have joined forces to try to survive, brought together after Lincoln's wife also walked out on him. Lincoln, for his part, has taken a page from the hero of Parks' America Play and is earning a subsistence wage playing the great emancipator for whom he is named, appearing daily in white-face, top hat and fake beard at a local arcade where patrons pay good money to re-enact one of the most famous assassinations in American history.

Booth, for his part, manages the money Lincoln brings home, making up for any shortfalls by shoplifting everything from shoes to champagne along the way. To wile away the hours, he alternately dreams of ascending the dizzying heights Lincoln once occupied as the local king of three card monte, and of reuniting with the lovely and now resolutely absent Grace. For the present, he fills the void Grace has left in his life with fantasies fueled by a range of girly magazines he has stolen and hidden beneath his cot.

In a story that careers in dizzying fashion between love and hate, hope and despair, Parks makes the language king, picking up the cast-off argot of the street and shaping and polishing it to a profanely poetic sheen that catches in the heart even while it dances in the ear. And in bringing that language to life, director Philip Akin and his two hugely talented players make the most of it, filling Camellia Koo's sprawling set with edgy, often pulsing life as they ride Parks' seesaw of despair.

For those accustomed to the kind of theatre that is content to examine how things once were, Topdog/Underdog will almost certainly represent a major stretch. But for those who prefer that their theatre examine the world the way it is, this is a banquet that shouldn't be missed.