In the current 20^th anniversary production of “Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan Lori-Parks reminds the audience that when one does not receive unconditional and nonjudgmental love and chooses to disconnect from one’s cultural and family histories, things can and will go terribly wrong. From the first scene of the play currently running at the John Golden Theatre, it is evident that there is tension between older brother Lincoln (a complex, unstable, yet broken Corey Hawkins) and his younger brother Booth (a deeply damaged, introspective, and abandoned Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). It isn’t this present tension that matters. It is Suzan Lori-Parks’s persistent scraping away at the barnacles on the underbelly of the brothers’ pasts that drives the plot in this chilling revival of “Topdog/Underdog.”

Lincoln and Booth’s Mom and Dad split when they were sixteen and thirteen respectively. Mom left first leaving Booth’s five-hundred dollar “inheritance” in a nylon stocking and charging him to take care of his older brother Lincoln. Two years later, their Pops left leaving Lincoln to surmise, “I think there was something out there that they liked more than they liked us and for years they was struggling against moving towards that more liked something. Each of them had a special something that they was struggling against.” Their struggles left the brothers without unconditional and non-judgmental love and a family history not worth emulating and difficult to remember. Against this background of infidelity, abandonment, and mistrust (especially of women), Lincoln and Booth continued their attempts to “hustle” a future with some semblance of normalcy.

After Lincoln’s buddy Lonny was shot while Lincoln was throwing the cards at Three-card Monte, he walks away from the scam and continues to hustle at the local arcade where he portrays Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865 at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. The irony of the names and the portrayal of the president by a black man with a white-powdered face is not lost on the audience. His brother Booth has hustled since boyhood: hustling for attention; hustling for love and acceptance; hustling for whatever he needs or desires by committing robbery after robbery; hustling his “girlfriend” Grace for marriage despite her obvious disinterest in him; and in the present deciding he wants to hustle with Lincoln at Three-card Monte.

There is enough bad blood between the brothers and sufficient stunning tropes in Lori-Parks’s narrative to assume anything less than an Armageddon will occur as the conflict-driven plot moves forward. Cookie threw Lincoln out forcing him to move in with Booth. Booth reveals he once slept with Cookie. Lincoln tells his brother that their names were Pop’s “idea of a joke.” Lincoln laughs at Booth with cruel insensitivity when Grace never shows up for the dinner Booth prepared. Booth asks Lincoln to “practice dying” to make his portrayal of the assassination. In this instance, practice makes perfect.

Under Kenny Leon’s deft direction, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II portray the brothers with authenticity and Suzan Lori-Parks reveals the dissolution in the brother’s relationship and the path to the play’s tragic ending with her usual skill as a wordsmith. She carefully creates a context in which to explore relevant social and racial issues without being overly didactic. What seems obvious at the start juxtaposed with the “unknown” that unfolds moment by moment, becomes palpable reality in disturbing and disquieting ways. This is a haunting narrative of a relationship between brothers that goes wrong mostly because a nuclear family never functioned as it should have in a socio-economic environment that fails far too many individuals.

The cramped “twisting” scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado, the subtle lighting design by Allen Lee Hughes, and the sound design by Justin Ellington add to the tension that develops as “Topdog/Underdog’s” plot moves to its shocking albeit predictable denouement.