Review: Topdog/Underdog | Jubilee Theatre - Fort Worth

Fort Worth — You'd think that three cards and two dynamic actors would make for a full house. But that wasn't the case on Saturday night of opening weekend at Jubilee Theatre, where the Fort Worth debut of Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog opened Jubilee's 31st season. The audience was at less than half-full, a big cry from the more family-friendly musicals that have long been the theater's bread and butter.

And that's a shame, because I've seen a handful of productions of this 2001 play in the past decade, and Jubilee's is the best of them by a longshot. And that includes a 2008 Dallas production that featured one of the actors in Jubilee's current cast, in the same role.

That was the debut production of Uptstart Productions, that group's only show at the now-closed Dallas Hub Theater. The actors, who also co-directed, were David Jeremiah and Christopher Dontrell Piper playing Lincoln and Booth, brothers haunted by a broken family history and tough breaks, and each on a different path to change their future. Both are fine actors, and the production received raves. I didn't review it, but my reaction was that it was difficult to buy them as brothers.

It's usually not a good idea for actors to direct themselves, and that is one reason why Jubilee's production works much better. The group's new artistic director Tre Garrett directs, displaying more potential than he showed in his first directing gig here, summer's solid Once On This Island. Jeremiah again plays Lincoln. Booth is Pennsylvania-based actor Gregory "Rico" Parker.

This pairing makes for more convincing brothers, and Garrett is able to play them off each other more successfully, with beautiful pacing and balance. He lets it simmer until the explosive ending boils over. You see it coming, if you know the rule of Chekhov's gun and take into account that the characters are named Lincoln and Booth. But it's still no less of a gut punch.

Lincoln supports them via his arcade job, in which he plays Honest Abe in white face, letting gamers shoot at him. Booth doesn't work, but scrapes by "boosting" items he needs. He also tries his hand at three-card, which he learned from the pro, his older brother.

To Booth, stealing or hoodwinking pedestrians isn't any more of a scam than what Lincoln does to carnival goers. The difference, Lincoln suggests, is that like those who spend money in casinos, his victims are willing to be duped. They know the house always wins, but there's still a thrill in the game.

That says volumes about the culture of young black men in our society, and it's embodied brilliantly by Parker's final, angry blow-up.

Playing off that idea, Michael Pettigrew's ingenious set on Jubilee's wide stage makes the brothers' small one-room New York apartment a cut-out of a cube, as if to suggest a jail cell. Nikki DeShea Smith's lighting has faint blinking lights constantly coming through a suggested window, and David Lanza's sound design gives us an occasional siren or ruckus out on the street.

And amid all the anger and foul language (what, you expect these characters not to drop F-bombs and other letter-bombs every chance they get?), there are signs of hope for a way out. One of Parks' best bits of writing comes when Booth tries to recreate a family dining table experience, with boosted China, crystal and a make-do tablecloth on a piece of cardboard that's positioned on stacked milk crates. (Sans tablecloth, that's also the three-card table.)

When called for, both actors let a hint of vulnerability peek through. But that's usually buried underneath layers of street-bred hubris, one-upsmanship and a general sense of being pissed off at the world.

The result, in the hands of Garrett, Jeremiah and Parker, is riveting theater that deserves bigger crowds. Jubilee is upping the ante, and the audiences should as well.

◊ Here's a shot of the looping video collage that shows before Jubilee's production: