You'll almost taste the ire

Brett O'Bourke, Miami Herald's Theatre Critic

"'Watch me now. Watch me,'' says Booth as he practices moving the three playing cards quickly around on the table. ``Pick the black card -- you pick a loser. Pick the other black card -- you got another loser. Pick the red card, you are a winner. Watch me now. Watch me close.'' Booth (Sheaun McKinney) is the kind of character you'd want to keep an eye on if you ran
into him in real life. He's a good thief, a not-so-good hustler; he's a young black man who learned to scratch out an existence for himself, by unlawful means, after his parents left him and his older brother, Lincoln (Bechir Sylvain), when the boys were adolescents. The two brothers, who inhabit The Collective's production of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Topdog/Underdog, live lives of desire, disappointment and violence. Now grown men sharing a squalid tenement apartment with no running water, the way Booth figures it, if Lincoln -- a magic-handed three card monte hustler -- would just teach him the tricks of the trade, all their problems could be absorbed into a thick roll of dollar bills. But Lincoln, fresh off his wife leaving him and the death of one of his old crew members, is trying to go straight. He's got a ''good, sit-down job with benefits'' impersonating Abraham Lincoln in an arcade where people pretend to assassinate him. Topdog is an exercise in brute force. As evidenced by the foreshadowing, there is no subtlety here. Laced with profanity and explicit talk about sex, the play marches toward its conclusion with the same kind of optionless inevitability that defines the brothers' bleak existence. Sylvain and McKinney deliver riveting performances. Staged in the intimate confines of Camera Obscura's perfectly broken-in black box theater space, the actors' angst and anger is as palpable as the sweat that drips from their foreheads. Director John Archie, a Carbonell-winning actor, makes his first turn in the director's chair a successful one. It helps that he knows the material from both sides of the stage; Archie played Lincoln in the Mosaic Theater's 2004 production of the play. The Collective's Topdog is an easy pick for a winner. Watch it. Watch it close.