![]() ![]() In 2019, 18 years after its first production, Topdog/Underdog cracks across the stage like a thunderclap. ![]() Parks wrote in an introduction that the play is "about family wounds and healing." After seeing the galvanizing production directed by Regge Life that opened last Friday at Shakespeare & Company in the Berkshires, I can't help feeling that she undersold, perhaps intentionally, the significance of this work, which is about so much more. ![]() The play premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2001 before moving to Broadway and winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog in many ways dismantles the idea of the American dream. And this has never been the case in America, especially for people of color. For it to be true, all Americans would have to have the opportunities - educational, economic, and otherwise - to rise to their potential. This, most reasonable adults know, is a lie. Most American schoolchildren are taught that everyone in this country has the opportunity to be whatever they want to be as long as they work hard enough. Deaon Griffin-Pressley as Booth and Bryce Michael Wood as Lincoln in Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, directed by Regge Life, at Shakespeare & Company in the Berkshires. ![]()
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