Stage Review - TopDog / UnderDog (ArtsWest)
Stage Review - TopDog / UnderDog
Presented By: ArtsWest - Seattle, WA
Show Run: February 05 - March 01, 2026
Date Reviewed: Thursday, February 05, 2026 (Opening Night)
Run Time: 2 Houts, 20 minutes (including a 15 minute intermission)
Reviewed by: Patrick Hogan
Topdog/Underdog, a two-hander now playing at ArtsWest has a happy ending for you, if clarity leads to happiness. Comparing the characters’ context to a game, what’s clear is: with the playing board presented to them and with the pieces they are given, they can make any move they want, but there will be no winner.
The show is written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton. “Two Black brothers trying to survive the American Dream,” is the apparent contradiction actor ML Roberts uses to describe the show in one of the well-done videos posted on the ArtsWest website. But it’s true; the play is a comedy/tragedy.
Nearly all of the action happens on a raised platform, one corner of which is pointed at the center of the audience. It’s brilliant and inspired scenic and lighting design thanks to Peter Rush and Andrew D. Smith, respectively.
The platform is surrounded by a translucent curtain fashioned like a giant American flag, a bit faded and discolored. It’s hooked to a track up above so that it can be pulled around to reveal or conceal the platform, the way you pull a curtain around a patient’s bed in a hospital room. Oh, and the flag is upside down. Distress.
As the show begins, the flag/curtain is pulled over and around revealing Booth, played by Yusef Seevers. He’s working on teaching himself to deal three card monte, the con game. He clearly needs to keep practicing but he clearly is committed to learning the hustle.
He does this in what looks like a tiny, shabby apartment. There’s a bed, a ratty recliner, plastic milk crates that play various roles: table, storage bin, book shelf, hamper. There’s a forlorn little steam radiator that also doubles as seating. Everything’s got to be multi-use.
Soon, ML Roberts as Booth’s older brother, Lincoln comes through the door. He is literally dressed as Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, who was assassinated in a theater while watching a play, imagine that. He’s got the frock coat, the stovepipe hat, the fake beard and everything, right down to the white makeup caked over his Black skin. It’s striking, haunting and a little disturbing, thanks to costume designer Hannah Larson.
The reason for the get up is Lincoln works at an amusement arcade on the boardwalk. His job is to sit in a chair pretending to watch the play while paying customers are given cap guns to sneak up behind and pretend to shoot him with. Imagine that.
Before long, the raised platform becomes a sort of boxing ring as well. The brothers clearly love each other and they clearly are at odds over mundane things like how the bills get paid. There are deeper things. It’s implied that Booth helped precipitate Lincoln’s split-up with his wife. There are things from further back in time but still present involving how they each dealt with their parents’ breakup and what Booth calls their “inheritance.” And the present issue is that Booth wants Lincoln to teach him to be an expert at three card monte. It’s his only way out.
In his day, Lincoln was the best dealer around, plying the simple but effective swindle while building a reputation and a bankroll to match. But something traumatic happened. Lincoln swore off the con and drifted into his current sit-down job, as he calls it. He won’t teach it to Booth. He does relent a few times but only just long enough to mock Booth’s lack of skill. This of course makes Booth want it more.
The stories and the history pile on. I started to wonder what it was adding up to. This is not to say I was frustrated by Topdog/Underdog. The point is I was in a place of feeling a need to know where it was going. How do these two get out of this? Or can only one of them come out on top? Probably the same thing Lincoln and Booth were feeling. Empathy. The play was working.
The wondering ended as the second act began. It was clear the first half had built an amazing base. The ingredients that had been thrown into the pot started bubbling, boiling, building to the intense ending. Director Valerie Curtis-Newton, in another of the videos posted on the ArtsWest site called it a “visceral play,” and it is that for sure.
And you do have to feel it, so it would be unfair for me to try to describe it or summarize the second half the way I did the first half. But I will say there is a powerful, gutting moment near the end. Booth comes to a realization of the kind that I described in the first paragraph of this piece about winning and losing. I felt myself melting. Not long after, the play ends. The audience is silent. Stunning.
No one wants to hear me, a white guy, talk about how “some of my best friends” are Black. At the same time, something that happened more than 30 years ago stays with me. I was with a group of eight or ten friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends, mostly Black and a few white. It was a warm summer Seattle weekend afternoon and we seemed to be taking all day to enjoy it. Another friend, Jamie (not his real name) joined the group.
“How ya doin’ Jamie,” one says. “I’m a Black man in America,” says Jamie.
It hit me hard. I could never know everything that’s balled up in that simple statement. But I got that Jamie was referring to something that is always present, and you can’t take a day off from. That evening in the theater surely brought me further down the road to knowing and feeling what that statement could mean.
Topdog/Underdog, per director Valerie Curtis-Newton is “the story of two brothers trying to… find a way to heal the generational trauma and come out the other side.” But, “in its most basic form, they are trying to win an unwinnable game.” The actors, ML Roberts and Yusef Seevers call it, “hilarious, heartbreaking and relevant … hysterical, Black and important.” It is all of those things and more.
Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, produced by ArtsWest and The Hansberry Project opened February 5 and runs through March 1 at ArtsWest in West Seattle. The show is approximately 2hrs & 20 minutes, including a brief intermission. For information and tickets, and to check out the videos I mentioned, go here: https://www.artswest.org/
Photo credit: John McLellan
