Are you familiar with three-card monte? If you've seen the "hat dance" at Busch Stadium, that's the basic premise of how it works, but unlike the sliding batting helmets, three-card monte is a scam. The most common place to see it is on the streets of New York, where a dealer sets up on the sidewalk and his co-workers pretend to be part of the crowd. It's fascinating to watch, as mesmerizing as a snake, and about as dangerous, at least to the bankroll.
"Top Dog/Underdog", currently at the St. Louis Actors Studio, takes place in a rooming house in New York. Two brothers, named Lincoln and Booth for relatively unexplained reasons, live there, scarcely scraping by. The elder,Lincoln, played byReginald Pierre, was once a dealer of three-card monte, but now has a more legal but ill-paid and extremely humiliating job. Chauncy Thomas, the younger, wants desperately to learn the skills of the cards.
The relationship between the two is both close and jagged, and that's the heart of the story. Booth, the last-born, is impulsive and volatile, switching back and forth between charm and visceral anger, and Thomas does the best work I've seen from him. His opening monologue alone is enough to grab the audience and pull them along. Pierre, who exhibits a preternatural calm much of the time - is Lincoln stolid or just exhibiting hard-won self control? - drags himself off to Times Square to his job with daily dread.
The play won the Pulitzer in 2002 but it has some holes in it - Lincoln's monologue in the second act is terribly forced, for instance. Author Suzan-Lori Parks nevertheless paints an acutely accurate picture of desperate lives in inner-city poverty.
And both actors do remarkable work.
Top Dog/Underdog
St. Louis Actors Studio
Gaslight Theatre
through October 6
Comments