Topdog/Underdog, or quite the opposite

I, for one, did not catch the allusion to the Abraham Lincoln assassination until now. Just kidding.  Parks makes great use of theatrical mirrors in Topdog/Underdog, meaning that she calls out to something outside of the script. The question asked of me is to find the significance and correlation of the two central mirrors in the play: Lincoln’s assassination performance and the three-card Monte card game that Booth seeks to learn from his brother. In the play, we learn that the character of Lincoln dresses up every day as Abe himself and lets people pretend to shoot him at the arcade he works. We also learn that this same character was once a very successful three-card Monte player; a skill his brother, Booth, is trying to perfect. I think these two elements have a lot to do with each other. For one, both of these elements have the quality of performance to them and both cost customers money to participate. Both of these performances are highly feigned in that both Booth and Lincoln are taking on the role of a character when they are participating in said acts. Also, from what I’ve read about the card game itself, it appears that even when the customer picks the correct card, the dealer is able to cheat the system, thus cheating the customer out of his rightful money. In Lincoln’s assassination performance, he is “cheating” people into thinking they are getting to shoot one of America’s most prominent figures of all time. In both performances, the customer is getting tricked into believing something and while they may feel as if they have been, it does not keep them for coming back. I guess with both Lincoln’s assassination performance and the three-card Monte game, you could argue that, in regards to the customer/dealer, the role of “topdog” and “underdog” could be up for argument. Who comes out on top and who on bottom?