And that’s why Booth-3-Card wants to team up with his big bro: “You would throw the cards and I’d be yr Stickman. How the heck did he get out of the store with that? That is impressive. Suits, sneakers, belts, ties, crystal, champagne, even a folding room screen. Not that Booth-3-Card!-doesn’t have skills: He is a master shoplifter. You can practically feel the entire theater lean in to watch an artist at work.

“Lean in close and watch me now…” he whispers. You can’t learn that level of skill you’re born with it. Lincoln, meanwhile, moves his hands with an almost balletic grace.

He’s like a dancer who keeps looking at his feet. Pick-uh-black-card-you-pick-uh-loser.” But he pauses and stumbles, working clumsily, knocking a card out of place here and there. When he throws the cards, he knows the talk: “Watch me close watch me close now: who-see-thuh-red-card-who-see-thuh-red-card? I-see-thuh-red-card. Unfortunately, Booth-sorry, 3-Card!-lacks the gift for the game. Booth now decides that Three-card Monte is his true calling he even declares that he’s changing his name to 3-Card. (The names were apparently their father’s idea of a joke.) They were dealt a bad hand: Their parents deserted them when they were teenagers, leaving them each with $500 cash (their “inheritance,” as the siblings call it). (Two decades ago, the play did get lost in the much larger Ambassador, though it certainly felt at home in its off-Broadway premiere at the Public Theater.) And Arnulfo Maldonado brings all the walls in closer with his wonderfully grotty set, a single run-down room that can barely contain these two grown men let alone their outsize personalities.Ībdul-Mateen and Hawkins play, respectively, brothers named Booth and Lincoln. It’s Cain versus Abel, brother versus brother, nature versus nurture, dealer versus mark in Suzan-Lori Parks’ power punch of a play Topdog/Underdog, now receiving a formidable revival 20 years after its Broadway premiere and Pulitzer Prize win.ĭid Parks’ modern-day Greek tragedy always reach out and grab the audience like Kenny Leon’s production-starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (an Emmy winner for HBO’s Watchmen) and Corey Hawkins ( Six Degrees of Separation on Broadway, In the Heights on screen)-does today? The choice of the Golden, one of the smallest Broadway houses with only 800 or so seats, certainly helps. Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Topdog/Underdog.

Corey hawkins topdog