Taking pot-shots at the great emancipator

What has Abraham Lincoln done to deserve this? In Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks's astonishing play, Lincoln comes home after a hard day's assassination, asks Peter Crawley

A black man who shares his name with one of America's most enduring icons, each day Parks's Lincoln dons a white face, false beard, frock-coat and stovepipe hat to sit in an arcade while customers queue up to shoot him. Lincoln, a former supreme hustler of the three-card monte, takes pride in his job. It's honest work. Or is it?

"Dressing up like some cracker-ass white man, some dead president and letting people shoot at you sounds like a hustle to me," offers his brother, Booth, who, fatally, shares his name with Lincoln's assassin.

Parks's play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama just one day after opening on Broadway in 2002, and was recently produced by Tall Tales theatre company as part of the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival, is essentially the tale of two brothers. It is also a microcosm of black American history, deftly played out through an acrid and arch symbolism. Lincoln, the Founding Father and great emancipator who, as every good American schoolkid knows, freed the slaves, now shackles an African-American within a cynical game. When the characters of Topdog/Underdog wonder why their father gave them these doomed names, the answer is as unsettling as it is simple: "It was his idea of a joke." The idea of a joke, of course, takes on many different forms and in recent years Abraham Lincoln has been the butt of a lot of them.

On a clear afternoon in Marlay Park last August, a father and his teenage son made rendezvous plans before the White Stripes's rock concert, while Canadian electro-shocker Peaches warmed up the crowd the only way she knew how. She invited her backing dancers - two tall women in bikinis, high heels, false beards, stovepipe hats and strap-on red phalluses - to help her express the lyrics of Shake Yer Dix through the medium of vigorous interpretive movement. With his son departing to hug the lip of the stage, the father gasped as two transgendered Abraham Lincolns engaged in simulated mutual masturbation and light bondage. Eventually he turned his back on the stage, plugged his fingers in his ears and stared purposefully at the Dublin Mountains.

It may seem like simple juvenile iconoclasm, but something is happening here.

Before MTV was completely transformed into a channel of wall-to-wall plasma-screened cribs and flamboyantly pimped-out rides, one could tune in for an hour and fully expect to see the video for Electric Six's signature tune, Gay Bar. There is nothing especially amusing about the frat-house homophilia of the Detroit novelty rockers shouting "I wanna take you to a gay bar" over a punk guitar line and a disco beat, but the video won awards from both Q magazine and Kerrang!, and one has to wonder why.

It is night time in Washington DC 1863, and the only light on in the White House belongs to - well, you've guessed it. Honest Abe is presented in his immediately recognisable get-up: bow-tie, beard and stovepipe. Slightly more anachronistic are his tight leather shorts and the countless other "Lincolns" who gradually fill the White House - if the pastimes of a 19th-century president included sweaty workouts, assisted bathing and enthusiastic pole-dancing, historical records are sketchy on the details.

If alternative culture in the US is currently enjoying a prolonged spate of Lincoln bashing the question is, why him? And why now? Would Peaches have been less shocking if her dancers had gyrated in the powdered wigs and pantaloons of George Washington? Would Electric Six have won fewer video awards if it had been George W. Bush cocking his cowboy hat and sliding suggestively against a metal pole? Probably.

As the face of the five-dollar bill, Lincoln's dark features are engraved with the uncomical grief and solemnity of 19th-century fatalism. As a symbol, too, he has an unusually shared currency among quite divided groups. Republicans cling to him as the first member of their party to become president. liberals hold to him as a great unifier and emancipator. Socialists present him as a champion of the labourer over the capitalist;conservatives have it the other way around. He was a poor boy, born in a log cabin, with an authoritative baritone voice, who educated himself and fought the good fight against slavery. Or he was a middle-class man, a Shakespeare enthusiast, with a high-pitched voice that verged on shrillness, who was ambitious, and ambivalent about the plight of slaves. He is all things to all people.

According to Gary Wills's 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, he is the master orator and, because of him, "we live in a different America". In Parks's Topdog/Underdog, people unite only to assassinate him.

"More come in," says Parks's Lincoln. "Uh whole day full. Bunches of kids, little good-for-nothings, in they school uniforms. Businessmen smelling like two-for-one Martinis. Tourists in they theme-park T-shirts trying to catch it on film. Housewives with they mouths closed tight, shooting more than once."

An earlier work of Parks's, The America Play, had already featured a black Lincoln impersonator, known as The Founding Father, who allowed arcade customers to shoot him in turns.

"Every play I write is about love and distance. And time," Parks has said. "And from that we can get things like history." In her theatre, Lincoln becomes a prisoner of such history, and today he is a target for the bitter, the broken, the betrayed.

William Herndon wrote of Lincoln that "melancholy dripped from him as he walked" and the president's depressions are well- documented. A recently unearthed poem from 1838, The Suicide Soliloquy, is widely believed to be by the 29-year-old Lincoln, and features an almost romantic morbidity: "Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath,/ And glist'ning, speak your powers;/ Rip up the organs of my breath,/ And draw my blood in showers!" As a wartime president, presiding over a polarised nation and a culture of death, it is perhaps unsurprising that on both sides in the forthcoming US election, Lincoln has been significantly invoked.

Democratic candidate John Kerry may have quoted Lincoln in his speeches, but it is George W. Bush who has made of Lincoln a more triumphal platform. Landing his fighter jet on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln last May, Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq. You can fool all of the people some of the time, as Lincoln may or may not have once said.

Among so many dark satires, hissing polemics, sexual revisionism and political point-scoring, it may seem hard to find an untainted depiction of America's Founding Father. But look hard enough and you may find some. Whimsical folk combo The Mystic Chords of Memory take their name from Lincoln's masterful speech at his second inauguration. Meanwhile, on glossy teen soap The O.C., spoilt rich kids are guided home by the speaking computers in their sleek SUVs - the Lincoln Navigator.

Born in a log cabin, shot in a theatre and resurrected in a million unforeseeable guises, Lincoln may not quite be turning in his Memorial. He is malleable, a symbol of the people, by the people and for the people.