Approaching Moomtaj:
A Fairy Tale for Grownups

“My only competitor is the blank page.” - Suzan-Lori Parks

Topdog/Underdog began its Broadway run on April 7, 2002, after playing at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre. That year, the play received nominations for Tony Awards and won a Theatre World Award, and Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Despite the spectacular, seemingly overnight success of Topdog/Underdog (Parks received the Pulitzer only days after the play opened on Broadway), the breakthrough came as no surprise to champions of her work. For well over a decade, her writing has pushed the boundaries of theatre with bold, evocative language and daring thematic conceits. Even the titles of her work suggest an adventurous, sometimes mischievous style and extraordinary imagination: The Death Of the Last Black Man In the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities In the Third Kingdom, Fucking A, In the Blood, The America Play.

Parks’s writing style - restless, kinetic - dodges any straightforward description. Her language often follows the cadences of everyday speech, in all its jagged, illogical, humorous poeticism. “She is interested in the hypnotic and musical value of words,” writes Lee Jacobus, “which accounts for much of the patterning and repetition that marks her work.” Parks takes inspiration from sources as varied as Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, but one of her primary influences is jazz, with its riffs and variations on a central theme. “I play with words,” she explains. “I think the world is telling us. Telling us telling us something that is present but not written down.”

Parks takes an equally adventurous approach to structure. Topdog/Underdog contains standard dramatic elements - two characters, two acts, and a defined, high-stakes situation - but her earlier work exhibits far more experimentation. Imperceptible Mutabilities In the Third Kingdom has been compared to a choral poem, while Parks describes Death Of the Last Black Man - divided into five “panels” rather than two acts - as a pageant. The plays contain an abundance of abstract images and figures, usually not grounded in any traditional plot, mixed with passages of surreal poetry. Parks talks about the importance of “Rep and Rev” - repetition and revision - to the structure of her work: “A text based on the concept of repetition and revision is one which breaks from the text which we are told to write - the text which cleanly ARCS. . . . If you stick to that kind of writing, then all you can write is plays about black men being killed by policemen, as if to indict society, you need a Big Event.”

Alternatively, the “Big Events” in Parks’s plays defy simple précis. “Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history,” she explains. Unapologetically audacious in her exploration of racial themes, Parks has written about everything from the Middle Passage to the vicissitudes of contemporary urban living. Her plays frequently explode racial stereotypes, usually ones that are considered the most offensive or taboo. Rather than shy away from ugly epithets, Parks places them front and center, exhibiting what critic Shawn-Marie Garrett has called “a stubborn refusal to romanticize the experience of oppression.” Death of the Last Black Man, first produced in 1990, presents characters with names such as “Black Man with Watermelon,” “Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork,” and “Old Man River Jordan.” When asked how she visualized these characters, Parks explained, “We’re a people who are often honored or damned because of the actions of one of our group. One of us stands for all of us. Those are epic stakes.” Still, she argues, “I don’t write headlines . . . . People say the black experience is X, and usually the X is the sorrows and frustrations and angers of people who have been wronged. That’s all we get to write about. . . . Well, that’s very important, but it’s not my thing.”

Instead, a concern with history - and the impossibility of defining what “history” means - prevails in Parks’s work. She considers theatre to be “the perfect place to ‘make’ history,” given its oral and expressive dimensions. Her plays frequently reveal the dangers of historical narrative and the manner in which characters can be swallowed up by their nations or race; thus a fully realized individual can easily fade into stereotype. Just as easily, however, history itself can evaporate. In Last Black Man, when a character delivers an important line, the ensemble repeats: “You should write it down and you should hide it under a rock.” In Topdog/Underdog, the missing family evokes this sense of loss; unmoored by the disappearance of their mother and father, Booth and Lincoln search for any means to establish an identity.

In recent years, Parks’s works has gravitated toward realism, with several major plays grounded in the present day. Nevertheless, her concern with historic figures continues, and the character of Abraham Lincoln appears twice in her work: first in The America Play and again in Topdog. The similarities are remarkable: The America Play (1994) introduces us to a character named “The Foundling Father,” another black man who dresses up as Abraham Lincoln and resurrects the assassination as a tourist attraction. In The America Play, however, we only see The Foundling Father in the world of his arcade (in the “Great Hole of History,” as it is defined in that play). Parks explains that Topdog/Underdog grew out of her continued interest in this image. “I was thinking about my old play when another black Lincoln impersonator, unrelated to the first guy, came to mind . . . This time I would just focus on his home life.”

A curbside game of three-card monte also provided inspiration for the piece. "My interest . . . began one day when my husband Paul and I were walking along Canal Street and saw some guys doing the shell game. I was fascinated," Parks explains. Three-card monte, a simple confidence game, challenges the player (the mark) to stake a sum of money on the odds that he can choose the Queen of Spades out of three facedown cards. If the player chooses correctly, he doubles his money; if not, he loses his stake. Often, the mark bets a huge sum of money, fooled by the apparent simplicity of the game and unaware that the dealer is in league with the “outside man” (the person who explains the game to passers-by and convinces the mark to play). The odds, stacked from the beginning, provide a rich metaphor for Parks and her story of Lincoln and Booth: two brothers, whose names echo a history of foregone and disastrous conclusions, locked in a relationship of deceit, one-upmanship, and utter dependency.