The last buzzworthy Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary play to hit the Valley was Arizona Theatre Company’s staging of Nilo Cruz’s 2003 cigar factory drama “Anna in the Tropics.” Valley audiences discovered a playscript wrapped in great literature (Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”), filled with heightened, aloof language and brought to a close with a heavily, depressingly predictable ending.

It was a head-scratcher — a show both artistically robust and confusing in its mix of implied complexity and apparent predictability. Now, the 2002 Pulitzer winner — Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” — is being staged by small iTheatre Collaborative. A living room drama about two African-American brothers, broke and living on a diet of booze and delusion (counter that with “Anna’s” cigars and literary distraction), “Topdog” offers a playscript that is wrapped in historical metaphor (the older brother is named Lincoln; his little bro’ is named Booth), filled with hypnotically rhythmic language and — as you can infer by the brothers’ names and the gun that’s revealed early on — brought to a heavily, depressingly predictable ending.

It makes you wonder: Does it simply take aloofness followed by a predictable finish to score a Pulitzer?

“Topdog” may not have a core of Tolstoy to anchor it, but it does have a robust ancestry, owing serious debt to the slew of sibling rivalry tragedies across history, most notably the biblical story of Cain and Abel, and most obviously Sam Shepard’s drama “True West.”

Into that established structure, Parks tosses in helpings of surreal comic
irony: The brothers were named as a joke by their father, who abandoned them; Lincoln quit hustling three-card monte to work in an arcade where he dresses in whiteface, beard and stovepipe hat and sits in a mock-theater so customers can pay to step up and simulate assassinating our 16th president.

What plot there is, when Parks isn’t using “Topdog” to make angular, measured, but gritty, jazz riffs with language — teasing with Ebonics, pattering in the psych-out dialogue of three-card monte — surrounds Booth’s desire to usurp Lincoln’s legacy as a three-card master. But that’s only one link in Booth’s continuous string of cons.

In the iTheatre Collaborative show, an Arizona premier, director Charles St. Clair mines the first act for comedy and lets the second half reach its tragic conclusion with an unforced but focusing hand. That’s fine, but you can’t help but wonder if there’s a better way to balance out the two.
Actors Mike Traylor, as Booth, and Kevin Scott, as Lincoln, perform their roles sublimely, largely stepping back and making way for Parks’ language to take over. Their chemistry together is brilliant. We may know how this story is going to end — and, in a way that can’t help but come across, Lincoln and Booth, too, seem to know the ending — but Traylor and Scott suck us so deeply into their characters’ world, it’s just as much a shock to see them stop acting and take their closing bows as it is to hear the gun go off just a few moments before.

There are messages, layers and layers of them, waiting to be peeled away from “Topdog/Underdog.” Social messages, relationship messages, racial ones too, of course. Like “Anna in the Tropics,” though, message can sometimes take a back seat to artifice, and divining the heart of “Topdog” will take more than a cup of coffee and some small-talk after the show.

Perhaps that’s what we should assume from today’s Pulitzer-winning plays: Expect, as an audience member, that even after the easy ending, there’s still work to do.