Watch his hands: He’s absently fingering a wooden match, which he eventually uses to light a Dunhill. It’s a scene in which Mos Def, 28, doesn’t quite belong. There’s an almost comical level of hipness in the dim, candlelit Time lounge, with its cactuses behind glass cases and light boxes displaying psychedelic patterns. And he co-owns Nkiru Books, an Afro-centric bookstore in Brooklyn, with his frequent rap collaborator Talib Kweli. He’s also appeared in two recent films - Showtime and Monster’s Ball - and hosts HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. They have an album due out later this year. In his spare time, he’s been gigging and recording with Black Jack Johnson, his rock band, featuring members of Living Colour, Bad Brains and Parliament-Funkadelic. In a couple of hours, he’ll cross the street to the Ambassador Theater, where Topdog is playing. Time, incidentally, being of the essence for Mos Def these days. At the moment, he’s perched on the edge of a plush white chair in the lounge of the Time Hotel, just off Broadway near Times Square. You’d do well to watch both when spending any time with Mos Def, who has acted all his life but until now has been best known as a rapper - generally filed alongside socially conscious, innovative hip-hop artists such as Common and the Roots.
“Watch my hands,” Lincoln repeats, mantralike. Eventually, Line relents, working up his old street rap on a couple of milk crates in their tenement apartment. (He works at an arcade, where customers line up daily with fake guns to fake-assassinate him in his fake theater box.) Mos plays Lincoln’s younger brother, Booth, who spends much of the play pressuring Linc to teach him how to throw cards. He has since reformed - these days slapping on a false beard, white pancake makeup and a stovepipe hat for his role as an Abe Lincoln impersonator. Wright portrays a onetime three-card-monte hustler named Lincoln. Wolfe, who cast him opposite Jeffrey Wright in the two-man show. Instead, Mos Def received a call from the play’s director, George C. When I heard it was going to Broadway, the only thing I wanted to be in was the opening-night crowd with some pretty shit on.” But I had no idea I would ever be in the show. “To me, it was like hearing ‘A Love Supreme’ for the first time, or Mingus, or Hendrix. “I was a huge fan of the show,” says the rapper and actor, with a sheepish grin. WHEN TOPDOG/UNDER DOG, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that’s being hailed as one of the most exciting shows on Broadway, made its debut last summer at a downtown theater, Mos Def was in the audience.
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