A former three-card-monte street hustler, he is working at an entertainment arcade impersonating Abraham Lincoln in an attraction that invites spectators to shoot him. Lincoln is crashing at his younger brother’s place (dingily materialized by scenic designer Shaun Motley) after his wife kicked him out. There’s no getting around the somber squalor when the vernacular fizz is played down. The language doesn’t have the same electric pop, but the situation is presented with a bit more grit. The rhythm between Larry Bates’ Booth and Curtis McClarin’s Lincoln is slower, less syncopated than it was between Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def in the Broadway production.
The production, directed by Seret Scott, drains some of the jazz from this propulsive two-hander, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama. They laugh and poke fun out of a kind of slow-burn despair that can occasionally seem like a ghetto “Waiting for Godot.” Other times their story will have you thinking more biblically - Cain and Abel for starters. These men aren’t just prisoners of memory, they’re stuck in a grimy economic jail cell with little chance of parole.
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