The street scam known as three-card monte needs a whole team, says playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. "It takes about five or more people to create a lot of excitement, throwing money down, saying, 'Man, you gotta play this game!'"

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In other words, it takes an ensemble -- and in that way, it's like a play, even a two-character play such as "Topdog/Underdog," for which in 2002 Parks became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama. It played off-Broadway, then had a healthy Broadway transfer. Now, it's in previews at City Theatre.

"Topdog/Underdog" concerns two African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Lincoln was once a three-card operator and Booth is a shoplifter -- a "booster," Parks says -- who wants to learn his brother's craft. But Lincoln is trying to go straight: He has a job in a seedy arcade, dressing as his presidential namesake, letting people take shots at him. Living together in a small room, the two brothers jockey and bicker, playing out a trajectory that may or may not end like its historical parallel.

At City Theatre, Ray Anthony Thomas and Billy Porter play Lincoln and Booth, under the direction of City's artistic director, Tracy Brigden.

"You need a family to carry it off," Parks says, speaking both of three card and of plays in general. Not that "Topdog/Underdog" is based on her own family, where there are no pairs of brothers. "It's a play!" she insists. "These days, we think writers get into lives through biography -- your mother, your brother. But from Sophocles on down, there are many brilliant examples of writers who get into other lives by other means. That other way is the river of the imagination, which is more exciting, bigger and more powerful than if I'm telling the story of my mom.

"We're all in this thing called family. I'm not a guy, but I embraced the experience of these two men. You go outside your own home and realize you're intimately connected to people you haven't seen before. It's a lot closer to home than people expect at first glance."

Parks was talking from her front yard in Los Angeles, where she runs the grad program in writing for performance at California Institute of the Arts. Born in Kentucky, she moved around because her father was in the Army, then lived for a long while in New York City, moving to Los Angeles with her husband about four years ago. She's at ease on the phone -- lively, personable, smart.

"My parents brought me up with street smarts," she says. "I know when something looks like a big rip-off. It's like when [in another big city scam] somebody rushes up to you on the street with a wallet of money, 'Oh, my god, look what I just found, what should we do with it?'"

She laughs at that. "I'd rather go to Vegas and play a slot machine -- all that's about is trying to win some money." Three card and other scams, of course, are more about thinking you're going to outwit someone and get something for nothing. That's one possible metaphor in the play, which has been compared to "a cross between a hip-hop riff and a Greek tragedy."

Lincoln and Booth inevitably suggest a historical metaphor, too. But Parks leaves all that up to the audience: "I don't know if it means anything besides what it is," she says.

As to the play's humor, Parks points out when Wolfe took the Broadway cast (Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def) to London's Royal Court, the audience loved it, "and they got all the jokes." Now, it's playing at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A. in another production, also directed by Wolfe, that started at Seattle Rep. And there's a different production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

In other words, Parks has not held back the rights, hoping for some big-ticket tour. "My whole feeling about this play is that it's important to give it to the world. See the George Wolfe production, but also see it in Chicago, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Let people do their own version. Two Indian actors who want to do a reading were at the talk-back at the Taper: 'Great,' I said, 'have fun, it's for you.'"

Asked for playwrights she admires, Parks starts with August Wilson -- "I look up to him so much" -- then tumbles out a lot of other names: "Sam Sheperd, Brecht, Ntozake Shange, Albee, Tennessee Williams; Mac Wellman among the weird ones; Adrienne Kennedy ..."

Was Wolfe an influence as a playwright, especially his satiric "Colored Museum"?

"No, I'm more like August's plays," she says. "I'm not really the 'I have something to tell you' kind. My plays are more like, 'I have a story to tell you.' I don't have a message. My plays [work] the way a dream moves you toward action from deep within, not from without, not 'hey, you gotta do something.' " She likes a play to work "like wormholes into their conscious, like a myth would."

So in teaching playwriting, Parks encourages her students "to listen to their gut and not to worry about getting it right the first time. You embrace the ocean of the imagination, and then later invite in the re-write team to smooth the surfaces and connect the dots."

She takes just two students a year for the three-year program, so she deals with just six students at a time. "I'm sort of like their art mama, a mentor more than teacher, but a teacher, too. I take the time with them. We start with plays, read a lot of Shakespeare, write screenplays. If they feel like writing a novel, I say go for it."

Parks has written a novel of her own, "Getting Mother's Body," published last year by Random House and coming out in paperback this April.

"I don't know if I'm a theater person," she says. "I think I'm a writer."