Identities In Suzan Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog

Identities in Suzan Lori Parks’s TopDog/Underdog are formed through their status in the society Suzan-Lori Parks, an African American playwright, is the writer of Topdog/Underdog. She rose to prominence in the community after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the play in 2002. The play centers on the adult lives of two Black brothers, Lincoln, and Booth. They are dependent on one another to deal with issues of financial instability, abandonment, and the absence of women in their lives. Lincoln and Booth were both given the names by their father as a joke, which foreshadows their future in this drama. Lincoln was once an expert at the Three-Card Monte and later made a profession by portraying the former president (Abraham Lincoln) for people to

(Parks, 2001) This paper aims to compare and contrast Myka Tucker Abramson’s The Money Shot: Economies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/Underdog with Jochen Achilles Postmodern Aesthetics and Postindustrial Economics: Games of Empire in Suzan Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog in terms of their close reading to the primary text of Suzan Lori Parks’s TopDog/UnderDog. “Myka Tucker Abramson discusses that the play Topdog/Underdog illustrates the connection between the two brothers' individual psychodramas and the fundamental themes of economy, racism, and masculinity. She argues that both Lincoln and Booth are in crisis - economically and with respect to their masculinity.” (Abramson 77) “Abramson also states that Parks discusses the importance of names in TopDog/UnderDog, recognizing that they are two brothers and are incidentally named after the president of the United States and his assassin. While we have to take these words at least slightly tongue-in-cheek, it is important to heed her warning that Lincoln and Booth are not stereotypes or archetypes; they are brothers, workers, fighters, lovers; they are complete characters and need to be treated as such.” (Abramson