Curtain Call: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II To Make His Broadway Debut In ‘Topdog/Underdog’

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins - Cindy Ord/MG22 /Alberto E. Rodriguez / Stringer

Broadway: Topdog/Underdog is set to return to Broadway for a special 20th-anniversary run. Susan Lori-Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play will return directed by Tony winner Kenny Leon and star both Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins. Topdog/Underdog tells the story of two brothers jokingly named Lincoln and Booth as they navigate their shared traumatic history. The play originally made its world premiere Off-Broadway in 2001.

McKinley Belcher III is set to play Happy Lowman in an upcoming revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. His castmates include Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke reprising their roles and Willy and Linda Lowman, as well as André De Shields as Ben. Under the direction of Miranda Cromwell, this revival intends to recontextualize the classic through the perspective of a black family in a white-dominated capitalist society.

Off Broadway: Where the Mountain Meets the Sea will be making its New York premiere this fall. This new play by Jeff Augustin tells the story of young man seeking connection with his father, a Haitian immigrant, by embarking on a road trip similar to the journey his father took from Miami to California.

A new bilingual musical produced by TheaterWorksUSA has begun a series of free performances set to spread to multiple venues across New York City. El Otro Oz tells the story of Dora, a Latiné teen who is transported to a different world as her quinceañera swiftly approaches. This imaginative Mexican folk-inspired work strives to capture the experience of navigating the Mexican-American identity.

The Public Theater has announced its slate for the 2022-23 season. Included in it are two world premieres from playwright Suzan Lori-Parks. Plays for the Plague Year tells the story of a family’s daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic and it scheduled to run in November of this year. The Harder They Come, Parks’ new musical, is set to premiere in the winter of 2023. Other announced shows for The Public Theater’s fall season include Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, as well as revival of A Raisin in the Sun.

Regional: Theatre Raleigh has begun its production of Yellow Face, a 2007 play by Tony-award-winner David Henry Hwang. The self-referential play follows Hwang as he protests the casting of a white man the lead in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, only to inadvertently cast a Caucasian actor in his own Broadway-bound comedy, believing the performer to be mixed-race.

Anna in the Tropics, a 2003 Pulitzer-winning play from Nilo Cruz, will have performances at the Barrington Stage Company alongside the world premiere of May Treauhaft-Ali’s ABCD. Anna in the Tropics takes place 1929 and tells the story of a lector who witnesses the parallels between the lives of the characters in Anna Karenina and the lives of the workers in the Cuban cigar factory she’s reading it to.

ABCD tells a story that looks at inequity in the American public school system. The new play follows students and teachers as they struggle to choose between their integrity and their success. This struggle expresses itself in two different public schools within the same city.