He would live with his brother, a man named Booth.” Topdog/Underdog is often compared to other plays and novels that explore racial identity because its main characters are two young black men struggling to survive in America. He would be a former 3-card monte hustler. This new Lincoln impersonator’s real name would be Lincoln. In the foreword to the 2002 edition of Topdog/Underdog, Parks explains that she was thinking about this character when she suddenly had a new idea for a play: “This time I would just focus on this home life. In this play, a black gravedigger resembles and adores President Lincoln, so he works as an impersonator, allowing his customers reenact John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln. At the end of the play, Booth (the character, not John Wilkes) shoots his brother, Lincoln, thus echoing the famous assassination of President Lincoln.įirst and foremost, Topdog/Underdog owes one of its defining conceits-a black man who works as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator-to The America Play, which Suzan-Lori Parks wrote in 1992. President Lincoln’s death devastated the nation, though it did nothing to reverse the fate of the Confederacy-the Union solidified its win of the Civil War the following month. President Lincoln died early the next morning, and Booth was later captured and killed in a barn in Virginia. In the chaotic aftermath, Booth jumped off the balcony and onto the stage, injuring his leg but still managing to escape.

Lee (commander of the Confederate Army) surrendered to Union forces, John Wilkes Booth (a famous actor and fanatical Confederate supporter) snuck up behind President Lincoln in a theater balcony during a play and shot him in the back of the head. In 1865, the final year of the Civil War, the Confederacy (a group of pro-slavery southern states that seceded from the United States in 1860) was failing in its fight against the Union in support of states’ rights and slavery. The play’s two main characters, Lincoln and Booth, are named after prominent historical figures: President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth.

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