Although Abraham Lincoln championed abolishing slavery, Booth doesn’t want to remember the past at all, instead dismissing the matter entirely by calling Lincoln’s job “fucked-up. In the same way that he ignores Lincoln’s earlier suggestion to change his name to Shango (thereby renouncing the fraught racist history that has inevitably shaped his life) he rejects the idea of his brother sitting dressed up in whiteface and pretending to be somebody who lived during slavery. With his cockiness and overeager attitude, Booth is unlikely to grasp this, instead viewing the process of deception as nothing more than a matter of “luck.” Furthermore, he expresses a certain discomfort toward Lincoln’s job, a sentiment that perhaps stems from his unwillingness to acknowledge painful histories. In 2018, my critic colleagues at The Times declared Topdog/Underdog the best American play of the previous quarter century explaining the choice, Ben Brantley, who was then the paper’s. Indeed, the fact that it involves “skill” means there are a set of techniques and steps a dealer must understand in order to successfully con a person. But the most interesting stories go far beyond those top categories. The idea that playing cards is “work” requiring “skill” implies that the act of deception is more complicated than it looks.
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