The Money Shot: Economies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/Underdog

Abstract

In “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” playwright Suzan-Lori Parks lays out the difficulty of writing plays about black people without falling into an essentializing “Black Aesthetic.” Theatre, she argues, is useful for black people because it “can ‘tell it like it is’; ‘tell it as it was’; ‘tell it as it could be’” (21); and, indeed, Parks's plays are continually exploring the limits and intersections of all three. “[T]he writing is rich,” she continues, “because we are not an impoverished people, but a wealthy people fallen on hard times” (21). When we consider this metaphor in light of Parks's well-known dramaturgical focus on black male characters, it becomes a highly charged one. In Topdog/Underdog, for example, Lincoln, a previously married and relatively prosperous hustler, has been left by his wife and is now working in a mall, dressing up as the historical Lincoln; his brother, Booth, has likewise been abandoned by his girlfriend, Grace, and is wholly dependent on Lincoln for money other than what he can make pawning stolen goods. Both characters are in crisis – economically and with respect to their masculinity – and Parks's notion of wealth is both a cause of and a metaphor for the crisis.

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