By Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Managing Editor of Layout & Features Editor
Roughly 50 Mount Holyoke students piled onto a bus to head to New York City on Sunday, Dec. 4, to see “Topdog/Underdog,” a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks ’85. The show is currently being revived at the John Golden Theatre after premiering off-Broadway in 2001 at The Public Theater and then first showing on Broadway in 2002. Parks won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play, becoming the first Black woman ever to do so, New York Theatre Guide reported. Interim President Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum facilitated a talkback after the show with Parks and producer Debra Martin Chase ’77. Producer LaChanze and director Kenny Leon joined Tatum, Parks and Chase for the first few minutes of the conversation.
The talkback was part of an initiative that Tatum started this fall called “Launching Leadership,” a series of conversations with alums who “have been opening doors, breaking barriers and providing leadership across a wide range of fields.”
The play follows two brothers, Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) and Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) as they try to make ends meet and grapple with their parents’ abandonment. Lincoln works as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and Booth tries, without much luck, to perfect his card-dealing con.
“A couple things struck me about the performance: For one, the playlist before the actual performance made my heart so full,” Adjoa Baidoo ’24 said. “It was so Black. I’d never heard anything like it on Broadway before. I remember looking [at] a complete stranger up on the mezzanine and jamming together to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’ and just being physically unable to stop smiling.”
“A couple things struck me about the performance: For one, the playlist before the actual performance made my heart so full. It was so Black. I’d never heard anything like it on Broadway before. I remember looking [at] a complete stranger up on the mezzanine and jamming together to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’ and just being physically unable to stop smiling.”
Baidoo hopes to be able to see the play again and is still processing the work; they commented on the themes of American capitalism and exploitation that the play explores. “Above all, American capitalism is a tangled contradiction, it’s a carefully calculated gamble that requires a level of inequality and exploitation to sustain itself. We’re at the point where we can see its incompatibility with human life in its current form,” Baidoo said. “In a country ruled by the gamble of capitalism, no one is ‘topdog.’ Neither brother wins, even when they do seem to.”
During the talkback, Parks discussed the “Topdog/Underdog” characters and how she came up with the idea for the play. She spoke about Lincoln’s job as a Black man impersonating Abraham Lincoln and how she thinks about it outside of the context of the play.
“When … the character Lincoln says … ‘I’m a brother playing Lincoln, it’s a stretch for anyone’s imagination, but everyday I put on this [costume] and I make it work. And it works because I make it work. This shit is hard but I make it work.’ What is he talking about? He’s talking about … the being of being, the ‘it’ of being alive. That everyday I put on this shit and … we put on our stuff and we walk out the door and we do what we gotta do to [do] whatever. And that’s hard, being is hard, it’s really hard, it takes a lot of work,” Parks said during the talkback.
Throughout the talkback, Parks often mentioned how she listens to her spirit and her soul when she writes. She explained that, as a writer, she hears a voice that guides her in the creative process. She described hearing this voice for the first time while sitting in her dorm room in Rockefeller Hall working on an assignment for class.
Baidoo described feeling inspired by Parks’ explanation of her writing process as they felt it is similar to their own, especially given that Parks “has walked the same halls, the same paths that I have.”
“I’ve noticed something about Black writers. Very often, they’re so perceptive in their observations of their times, that even decades after their work is complete, it’s still relevant. It’s the Octavia Butler effect: When you’re so tapped into the realities of living, your work becomes universal, to the point where it even feels prophetic,” Baidoo said.
When talking about her time spent at the College, Chase described feeling a sense of community and sisterhood. “When I [left Mount Holyoke] I wasn’t afraid, … as a woman, of pushing and demanding what I needed for me. And in those days in particular you didn’t always get that at a co-ed institution,” Chase said.
When the play ended and the audience gave a standing ovation. “I honestly couldn’t even stand out of pure shock,” Baidoo said. “Good art makes you think, and this certainly has.”