New Black Theater Goes
Deep: 'Top Dog, Underdog'
'Talk' and 'Is it a Human Being, Or a Girl?'

By Michael Eric Dyson
Special to SeeingBlack.com

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Three plays prove that great theater is not dead. On Broadway, Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks' ''Topdog/Underdog'' is a compelling exploration of desire and deception—especially between the two Black brothers who are the play's sole characters. Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright) and Booth (Mos Def) eke out a living by their respective hustles: Lincoln as a low-rent imitator of Abraham Lincoln, and Booth as a gifted thief and aspiring card sharp. Sibling rivalry is the unavoidable subtext of the play's wickedly ironic dialogue, as Booth tires of their hand-to-mouth existence while futilely insisting that older brother Lincoln return to the game Booth desires, but fails, to master: the three-card monte.

The play's language is both metaphysical and musical, flush with insight about the human condition that spits from the character's mouths like so many blue notes. Wright's and Mos Def's jazzed, improvisatory performances thrill. Wright is 1959 vintage Miles Davis, magisterially sketching intellectual chords in the linguistic landscape Parks lays out, and Mos Def is John Coltrane, emotionally swinging from the notes that hang loosely in the air.

I sat in New York's Ambassador Theater transfixed by their teasing, volatile antiphony, relishing the orchestrated cacophony that points to the music of undeniable truths that stream through our hearts and souls.

If Parks' drama probes the play of emotions on the psyche and soul, Carl Hancock Rux's riveting off-Broadway ''Talk,'' which played at New York's Joseph Papp Public Theater, was an ambitious play of ideas. Rux's drama took the form of a university panel discussion about Archer Aymes, a mythical literary figure who wrote one novel, turned it into a signifying art film, and became an activist whose participation in a demonstration led to a jail sentence where he died, perhaps by suicide. This summary barely limns Rux's intellectual tour de force, a formidably erudite and eloquent meditation on the strife between art and politics, race and reason.

Rux's characters, in both name and legacy, are inspired by Greek culture: the critic Ion, the actress and filmmaker Phaedo, the talk show host Meno, the jazz musician Meno, and the performance artist Apollodoros. As if testing the thesis of Martin Bernal, the Cornell University professor who argued that Greek ideals are greatly indebted to Afro-Asian influences, Rux courageously mixes experimental theater, Greek choruses, jazz-like rhetorical improvisation, post-structuralist theory, hip-hop and popular culture into a heady brew of critical reflection on Western intellectual life over the last 70 years. My brain teemed days after I left the theater.

D. Soyini Madison's ''Is It A Human Being Or A Girl?'' was a breathtakingly poetic performance piece that is at once ethnography and entertainment. It explored the complex tensions between ancient rites, religious beliefs, gender politics and human rights in West Africa. The performance, in Chapel Hill, N.C., is compiled from documents, traditional cultural practices, and conversations Madison—a noted performance studies professor and author—conducted with West Ghanaians affected by Trokosi. Trokosi involves sending a young girl below the age of 12 to a village shrine, sometimes for life, in atonement for a crime or transgression committed by a male family member against God or the community. Madison wrote and directed the performance, which includes 11 performers, one of whom captures the linguistic power of the production when she speaks of ''the shining hieroglyphics against a vast Black canvas.'' Madison's haunting, brooding, pensive performance forces us to ask how we can at once respect even troubling religious and cultural traditions while advocating human rights, and how the local and global can collide and collaborate in the creation of cultural meanings. I was moved in the intimate space of the performance to reflect on how these issues are never ultimately abstract, but deeply wed to our very identities.

When theater is truly good, it can make us pay attention to the personal and social dramas that engulf our lives.

Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of religious studies at DePaul University.

-- May 24, 2002

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