Bending Race Time

Please don’t hate me, but I had the immense privilege of seeing True West on Broadway in 2000 when Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly traded off the roles of brother Austin and Lee every three shows (I saw Hoffman as Austin, so Reilly did the toaster scene).   And please don’t hate me more, but I was also lucky enough a few years later to catch Suzan Lori-Parks’ Topdog/Underdog on Broadway with Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright.

So you can imagine how ecastatic I was to learn what the American Theater Company and Congo Square Theatre Company are doing with these two plays.   They’re running both brother-rivalry modern classics in rep, setting them both in present day, and swapping casts every week.  Yes, they’re swapping casts.  That means, for the first time ever, Lori-Park’s Pulizer Prize-winning play about African American brothers features a white cast for half the run, during which time the cast of Topdog/Underdog play the traditionally white brothers of True West.   They are bending what I’ll call the race-time continuum.

I’ve so far seen three of the four productions in the bold undertaking (I’ve yet to catch True West with the African American cast, next playing Feb 21st) and I have to highly recommend it to anyone listening.

I’ll lay out three reasons to catch these four plays:  Talent, Timeliness, and the bold experiment in Race.

1) The first thing to get out of the way is the talent involved:  No matter what incarnation you see, you’ll be treated to top-notch casts performing explosive material in an intimate, theatre-in-the-round setting, where emotion and props alike fly off the stage and nearly into your lap.

2) Then there’s the time factor.  The choice of the present-day setting reminded me contstantly that both play’s themes — family, class, art, mainstream entertainment, employment, crime, addiction, regret, you name it — all resonate with new power against today’s crumbling economic backdrop.  I’m telling you, it’s almost eerie how, plays once about “them” seem more and more about “us.” (And I must give the True West team kudos for mining gold out of the Mac Book power cord in today’s wireless world).

3) Of course, the crux of the project is the non-traditional casting and the questions it raises.   I’ve now seen both versions of Topdog/Underdog, and at first I had no idea how some of the play’s material would even make sense with a white cast.  But trust me, they have found a way – and the best thing I can say about the race reversal is that twenty or so minutes into the play I’d forgotten to analyze it.

No, I’m not claiming that the race issue “didn’t even occur to me” and I just realized, gee, we’re all the same after all.   On the contrary, the genius of reversing the race lies in revealing how it changes our perceptions.  When the African American Lincoln says they all treat him differently at his job, we gather he means this is due to his race.  When the white Lincoln makes the same claim, we decide something deeper must be “wrong” with him.   But is either assumption correct?   Plenty of moments like this come to light.

So yes, the non-traditional casting forces an audience to bend its mind around how we perceive people based on race.  But above all, with both casts I sat in the theater completely moved by the story.  That’s it.  As we’ve known for ages with the classics, we now have a contemporary theatrical example of how a plain old good story will always usurp the culture of those tell it.  It makes me proud of Chicago theater.