NEW YORK, NY.- Among the most thrilling and jarring gambits in modern theater, up there with the nattering woman half-buried in sand at the top of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” is the scene that opens Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog” with a bang. In a seedy rooming house apartment, as one man rehearses his three-card monte spiel — “watch me close, watch me close now” — Abraham Lincoln arrives with Chinese takeout.

But watch Parks, too. Her skittering silverfish of a play, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, glints with meaning that refuses to stay put. Although this Lincoln, like the one he’s named for, wears the requisite frock coat and stovepipe hat, we see at once that he’s a Black man in whiteface, and soon learn that he earns $314 a week for letting customers at an arcade pretend to shoot him. The spieler is his brother, Booth, whose vocation seems to be shoplifting. (“I stole and I stole generously,” he crows.) They are bonded by familiarity, mistrust and, as their names suggest, a history beyond their own.

How wonderful to experience again, in the hilarious, harrowing and superbly acted Broadway revival that opened Thursday at the Golden Theater, Parks’ fearlessness. Rejecting fixed meanings, as well as the limitations and cliches of correctness, she generates themes that her play will not so much corral as set free. There’s fraternal competition, as old and awful as Jacob and Esau. Race as fate but also performance. The endlessly sorrowful loop of American violence. And of course, sleight of hand: Before a minute goes by, Parks has her fingerprints all over your feelings.

Not that you can name those feelings; you don’t have time. Like three-card monte, or jazz, the play — and, at its best, Kenny Leon’s direction of it — moves too fast for analysis. The front story is clear about where it’s going, but you’re in the dark. The back story arrives indirectly, and just on a need-to-know basis.

Parks certainly plays her hand slyly. We learn that Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) was himself a card hustler only when Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) asks for advice on improving his routine. How each man fares romantically must be read between the lies. And the circumstances of their youth (their parents bolted) form a rain cloud over them long before the thunder arrives.

“There was something out there that they liked more than they liked us” is how Lincoln explains the abandonment; later we understand that it applies to more than blood.

Such daring construction and dense yet rhythmic language demand swift, high-wire acting; Lincoln and Booth are conning not just each other but also themselves and the audience. Hawkins, a Tony nominee in 2017 for “Six Degrees of Separation” and a star of the recent “In the Heights” film, gives an astonishing verbal and physical performance, creating a character whose thoughts aren’t posted on placards but expressed in the spin he puts on his words and the way he weaves his fingers. It’s also a beautiful vocal performance; he sings the droll blues Parks has written — “My best girl, she threw me out into the street/ My favorite horse, they ground him into meat” — as if it were deadly serious.

In a way, it is, because like everything else in “Topdog/Underdog” it serves at least double duty. (Lincoln uses the song to soothe himself but also to blackmail his brother emotionally.) The burden of that doubleness falls especially on Abdul-Mateen, whose character has a more surprising arc and must somehow make both ends of it meet. Although this is his Broadway debut — he’s won an Emmy for HBO’s “Watchmen” — he fully meets the challenge, banking sympathy with his sweetness, the better to clobber you when it flips into despair.

In between, he and Hawkins diabolically mess with your eagerness to sympathize, getting you to endorse their characters’ petty chicaneries and laugh at their string of improvements on Lincoln’s assassination. Leon stages these scenes for all they’re worth, setting them up like vaudeville turns and (with the help of Dede Ayite’s punchline costumes) building them to quick comic climaxes. That effect is enhanced by Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design, in which a glamorous Austrian curtain encircles the dingy room and a turntable suggests a never-ending peep show.

With that highly theatrical frame, one might have hoped for a more consistently theatrical staging. Passages of time between scenes, although marked by apt interstitial music (sound design by Justin Ellington), are too often visually null, letting the narrative energy sag. Allen Lee Hughes’ lighting, with its blood-red effects, is too obviously lurid for my taste. And in the second act, when the material gets heavier, Leon thickens the texture instead of sharpening it. As the con comes undone it should accelerate, not lumber.

Even so, this “Topdog/Underdog” is never in danger of being dragged down. For the most part, Leon makes sure that the actors keep Parks’ armamentarium of ideas airborne. The ending loses none of its explosive shock even if we’ve understood from the start that the odds in a hustle are always with the house.

It’s no secret who the house is here. In depicting three-card monte, Parks is also depicting capitalism, the uber-hustle. And although racialized violence is obviously implicated in a play that features a Black Lincoln, the story of economic violence feels dominant in this production.

Perhaps that’s inevitable with August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” and a Black-led “Death of a Salesman” running nearby, with Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” about to open downtown. All hinge on property, and the way their characters are torn by unfulfilled dreams of upward mobility. In “Topdog/Underdog” — the title tells you it’s about competition — even the losers parrot the language of “economic opportunity.”

But its brilliance is that it encompasses much more; there’s a reason my fellow Times critics and I, in 2018, named it the best American play in the 25 years since “Angels in America.” Like “Angels,” or “Happy Days” or “The Piano Lesson” — or for that matter, the plays of James Baldwin, who was Parks’ mentor — it traps large forces in a small space and makes them fight it out.

Lincoln and Booth both being performers, you could call that small space the theater itself. Or you could call it history, about which “people are funny,” as Parks has Lincoln tell us. “They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.”

Which is exactly why we need “Topdog/Underdog” right now: to scream. It’s up to you whether to do so in laughter or pain — or, in shocking proximity, both.

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‘Topdog/Underdog’

Through Jan. 15 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; topdogunderdog.com. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.