If he is relatively plodding at cards, Booth excels at shoplifting-and we watch him dress, piece by piece, in that day’s swiped clothing. He wants them to take the profit-making trick out to the streets as a duo, but his idolization is underscored by anger.
Booth replies: “Dressing up like some crackerass white man, some dead president, and letting people shoot at you sounds like a hustle to me.”īooth in the play wants to emulate his brother’s card-sharp skills, especially at Three-Card Monte. Lincoln and Booth both know the irony of a Black man dressing up as the “Great Emancipator” in the service of breadline work today. He shows Booth how he can go straight down, he can go down with a flourish, and he can go down with his limbs in jangling dis-concert. Hawkins is a master of many things, one of them being the physical comedy to illustrate how he really feels he is animating his act at the moment of his subject’s assassination. Lincoln in the play is a President Lincoln impersonator, who puts whitener on his face, and a big stovepipe hat, and a fake beard (the on-point costumes are by Dede Ayite). As well as painful memories of times past, and a determination to surmount them and the racism of the world outside these doors, there is a jockeying for position going on-who can be successful, who will find love (Lincoln has left his wife, Booth has fallen for a woman named Grace), who is up on their luck, and who will be fatefully down on his. Two men, blood-tied but needling opposites, flipsides of a shared trauma they know all too well. The title of the play is the dynamic we see before us.
They are meaningfully named after both the iconic assassin and the iconic president. Lincoln is defined by Parks in her script as the topdog, Booth the underdog. Yet they remain yoked together, unable to separate, unable to bid farewell. They are Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, who want something to change-money to escape poverty, ambition to vault them somewhere new-who possibly want to say goodbye to one another, who are desperate to be somewhere else, who want to leave through that door. All we see of the men-bantering, being sweet, bickering, planning, dreaming, interrogating, infuriating, pacifying, angering-is in the room, with its one bed.
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