Brothers play their hand

In the theater, sisters often come in threes: Chekhov’s melancholy, Moscow-obsessed trio, Wendy Wasserstein’s upscale Rosensweig sorority, King Lear’s tragically misread brood of Regan, Goneril and Cordelia.

Brothers work better in pairs: “True West,” “Death of a Salesman,” the surrogate siblings of “Waiting for Godot.” Brother versus Brother is shorthand for all sorts of dialectical entanglements -- Ego-Id, Master-Slave, Monster-Martyr.

In “Topdog/Underdog,” the carnivorously intelligent, deeply humane new play by Suzan-Lori Parks, now receiving a bang-up production at the Mark Taper Forum, the only characters are two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth. A rather heavy-handed symbolic touch, you say? Trust me, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Parks, a Pulitzer Prize winner who’s been living in Southern California for several years, owns a pit bull named Lambchop. That’s a mighty playful name for a natural-born killer, but it’s in keeping with this playwright’s engaging sensibility: She frisks around, gets you laughing, then lunges for the jugular.

Parks’ courage as an artist shows here in her willingness to take an outlandish premise and convert it into an almost unbearable dramatic truth because, hey, wasn’t the United States of America itself a bit of an outlandish premise -- a slave society that dared proclaim all men equal? America is Parks’ perpetual subject, as she hinted in a previous work, “The America Play,” and her urban-burnout characters in “Topdog/Underdog” are as authentic as any barefoot native sons who ever floated down the Mississippi on a raft.

Self-consciously literary when it serves her ends, Parks has based one previous play on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” and her recent novel “Getting Mother’s Body” was influenced by William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” Here she refashions an American archetype made familiar by Mark Twain, Herman Melville and many others: the confidence man.

Lincoln (Harold Perrineau), the elder sibling, and Booth (Larry Gilliard Jr.) are con men -- the former lapsed, the latter a wannabe. Three-card monte is these tricksters’ game of choice, and as the play begins, Booth is trying to master the hustler’s art and entice his brother back into the game. But Lincoln knows just how fickle cards can be, and that once you start shuffling the deck, there’s no telling who’ll be victimizing whom.

Lincoln, you see, used to make his living by dazzling stupid tourists and greedy suckers with his glib patter and pyrotechnic sleights-of-hand. Then his partner got killed, a tragedy he still hasn’t gotten over.

So he’s trying to go straight, more or less. When he first appears, Lincoln is wearing his absurd work get-up -- the stovepipe hat, fake beard and funereal attire of America’s 16th president. His face, painted white, fittingly resembles a bull’s-eye. “Linc” works at a seaside carnival show, impersonating Honest Abe, slumping dead in a chair after thrill-seekers pay their money to shoot him with a blank gun. “It’s honest work,” he says about being a Dead Prez’s body-double. (The men’s names, Linc explains, were their father’s idea of a joke.)

Booth is more reckless and hopeful than his big brother. He’s got no steady work, but he does have a semi-steady girl named Grace -- “Amazing Grace” -- whom he’s eager to impress and subordinate to his libido. As financial and sexual tensions escalate over the course of two acts, the brothers dredge up painful, primal-scene memories of their parents’ various betrayals and infidelities. The silent conspiracies that engulfed their mom and dad have turned the men into foundlings. Trying to seize control of their destinies, they are dodging their own backfiring rage.

Obviously, none of this would add up without the electrifying bond that exists between these two brilliant young performers. Gilliard, a remarkably gifted physical actor, has a body that can move east-west while he flaps his jaw north-south, releasing braggadocious, staccato torrents of filial affection, envy and insecurity. His voice can rise like a young hawk’s shriek, then drop into a precipitous sulk.

Superficially, the shaking, jiving Booth is playing Goofus to his brother’s Gallant. But in the antics that ensue, the brothers will reveal that both these deuces are wild (just check out their Amos ‘n’ Andy-type shtick) and that each sibling has the desire to alpha-male the other into submission.

Initially, Perrineau’s Lincoln counters his loosey-goosey sibling with a tense, tightly compacted energy, as if he were holding himself together by sheer will. But as Lincoln begins to slip back into his former self, Perrineau mutates into a fluid, knife-edged predator, with an unsettling capacity for tenderness as well as mockery, restraint as well as cruelty. Perfectly balanced, the men’s portrayals harmonize like the fiery colors in a painting by the Harlem Renaissance master Jacob Lawrence.

Parks scrutinizes blackness the way Melville interrogated whiteness in “Moby-Dick.” She regards it not only as a specific ethno-historical identity but as a spiritual condition, a metaphysical property -- the question, of course, being, “yeah, but whose ‘property?’ ” Blackness in “Topdog/Underdog” is both a blessing -- Linc’s lightning-fast fingers throwing cards, the lyrical athleticism of the black vernacular, the exultant sob of a blues guitar riff -- and a curse of Cain-and-Abel proportions.

Though the play is symbolically top-heavy, the production never tips over. Deceptive simplicity is the revolving platform on which “Topdog/Underdog” spins, and director George C. Wolfe and assistant director Raelle Myrick-Hodges know exactly how much to turn this tightly structured work.

Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design of a dingy coldwater apartment is flattened out, stunted, spatially castrated. Water stains and peeling paint reinforce the sense of claustrophobic despair. An oval impression hovers faintly on the wall, like some forgotten ancestor’s missing portrait, and a taped-up antique chair alludes to the brothers’ fractured inheritance.

Scott Zielinski’s superb lighting design provides a silhouetted commentary on the main action, as the brothers’ shadows rise behind them like Kara Walker’s grotesque racial and historical caricatures, black and white.

Yet by invoking these stereotypes and archetypes, “Topdog/Underdog” forces us to look more unflinchingly into our own hearts. What we find there is both disturbing and vaguely ludicrous, dramatized in the amazing scene in which Booth and Lincoln repeatedly act out the infamous assassination.

It’s a deeply funny, deeply uncomfortable moment -- two men holding an audience and themselves captive by an act of reverse-minstrelsy. It is the American pageant both as tragedy and farce -- one nation, as indivisibly bound as black and white, reliving its past over and over again.

*

‘Topdog / Underdog’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave, Los Angeles.

When: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. No performances March 9-12; no 7:30 p.m. performance March 28. Extra performance 2:30 p.m. March 24.

Ends: March 28

Price: $33-$47

Contact: (213) 628-2772.

Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Larry Gilliard Jr....Booth

Harold Perrineau...Lincoln

Written by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Assistant director Raelle Myrick-Hodges. Scenic design Riccardo Hernandez. Costume design Emilio Sosa. Lighting design Scott Zielinski. Sound design Dan Moses Schreier. Production stage manager Mary K Klinger.