Topdog Underdog
Full-stack development for the official website of the 2022 Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog. Custom WordPress theme with a ticketing calendar, cast and creative team profiles, and a digital platform built to support a strictly limited engagement starring Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.
Development lead on this project at Situation Interactive.
Background
A Pulitzer Prize-winning play was returning to Broadway for its twentieth anniversary — with two of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors leading the revival.
Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog — the darkly comic two-hander about brothers named Lincoln and Booth by their father as a cruel joke — won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, making Parks the first African-American woman to receive the award. Twenty years later, the play returned to Broadway in a new production directed by Tony winner Kenny Leon, starring Corey Hawkins as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth. The strictly limited sixteen-week engagement at the John Golden Theatre carried significant cultural weight: two film and television stars bringing fresh energy to a canonical American play about race, identity, masculinity, and the hustle of survival. This was one of two plays I led development on that opened the same week in spring 2022 — the other being for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which opened at the Booth Theatre just days apart. Both projects ran in parallel at Situation Interactive, demanding tight coordination and shared architectural decisions across two distinct productions.
Previews began September 27, 2022 at the John Golden Theatre. The site needed to be live and converting before the first audience walked in.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a ticketing calendar, structured cast profiles, and a visual identity rooted in the play’s raw intensity.
I led development on a custom WordPress theme that served as the production’s complete digital platform. The ticketing calendar was the primary conversion surface — an interactive, date-based interface rendering the full performance schedule at the John Golden Theatre with real-time availability states and direct purchase links routing audiences into the ticketing provider’s checkout flow with the correct performance pre-selected. The cast and creative section featured structured biographical profiles for Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II alongside the full creative team: director Kenny Leon, scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado, costume designer Dede Ayite, lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes, and sound designer Justin Ellington. Each profile was managed through a dedicated content architecture that the production team could update without developer involvement. The frontend translated the production’s visual identity into code — a stark, stripped-down aesthetic that matched the play’s claustrophobic single-room setting and the tension between its two characters. SASS-driven component architecture kept the styling modular and maintainable. JavaScript handled interactive elements including the calendar UI, responsive navigation, and performance-driven animations that reinforced the production’s energy without competing with its minimalism.
Building this concurrently with the for colored girls site meant shared component patterns and a unified development workflow — two productions, one engineering approach.
Results
A Tony Award for Best Revival, over $4.5 million at the box office, and a platform that served the production from first preview through closing night.
The site launched ahead of previews on September 27, 2022, and served as the production’s primary digital platform through its entire run at the John Golden Theatre. Topdog/Underdog officially opened on October 20 and ran through January 15, 2023 — a sixteen-week engagement grossing $4,575,950 at an average ticket price of $71.45. The production won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, and both Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II earned Tony nominations for Best Leading Actor in a Play. The ticketing calendar drove conversions throughout the run, the cast profiles supported press coverage around two high-profile leads making their Broadway debuts in a Pulitzer-winning play, and the structured content layer gave the production team full editorial independence from launch through closing.
Between this production and for colored girls — both built and launched within the same window at Situation Interactive — the shared architectural patterns proved their durability across two distinct productions with different visual identities, audience profiles, and run lengths.
