When Topdog/Underdog," 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. On five separate occasions. "I was a huge fan of the show," says the rapper and actor, with a sheepish grin. "To me, it was like hearing 'A Love Supreme' for the first time, or Mingus, or Hendrix. But I had no idea I would ever be in the show. 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."

Instead, Mos Def received a call from the play's director, George C. Wolfe, who cast him opposite Jeffrey Wright in the two-man show. Wright portrays a one-time three-card-monte hustler named Lincoln. 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. (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. Eventually, Linc relents, working up his old street rap on a couple of milk crates in their tenement apartment. "Watch my hands," Lincoln repeats, mantralike. "Now watch my eyes."

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. 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.

Time, incidentally, being of the essence for Mos Def these days. It's a drizzly Friday afternoon. In a couple of hours, he'll cross the street to the Ambassador Theater, where Topdog is playing. 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. They have an album due out later this year. He's also appeared in two recent films -- Showtime and Monster's Ball -- and hosts HBO's Def Poetry Jam. And he co-owns Nkiru Books, an Afrocentric bookstore in Brooklyn, with his frequent rap collaborator Talib Kweli.

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. It's a scene in which Mos Def, 28, doesn't quite belong. Watch his hands: He's absently fingering a wooden match, which he eventually uses to light a Dunhill. It seems like a peculiarly Thirties-private-dick way to fidget, but then again, he's wearing a fedora.

"There's so much uniform shit going on in music," Mos says, sighing. "But it's like that with everything. Motherfuckers look more alike than ever. You see the same movie coming out, the same fashion designs. Even motherfuckers trying to be different, it's the same difference."

He orders a ginger ale, then a Coke. Watch his eyes: They rarely meet your own. He sits in profile, staring across the bar, or at a female friend in the opposite chair. (We are not introduced. Eventually, she whispers something to Mos and leaves.) Mos Def does not like getting personal. "To be a good artist," he says, "there's an amount of anonymity you need, to be able to observe life." During the conversation, he'll occasionally smile inappropriately, as if the straight answer he's just given you is actually part of an elaborate joke.

Still, the acclaim for Topdog seems destined to vault Mos Def's acting career to a new level. He's often hilarious in the show: One scene opens with Mos doing a slow striptease to James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," revealing several layers of boosted suits (along with a light bulb and an issue of the porn mag Black Tail). But the play also has a violent, rhythmic intensity, as the brothers circle each other like sharks, trading off edgy lines of dialogue like improvising musicians. "We really are playing notes for each other," says Wright. "It's like a contrapuntal symphony in that way. Every other word, every other space, is reliant on the next."

"What's really cool about watching Mos onstage is that there's such a freedom to him," says Topdog's playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks. "I'd guess it comes from a real inner strength -- not a conceited-pride, bullshit-frontin' kind of thing, but a strong heart-center, like you say in yoga. A warrior spirit."

Mos -- born Dante Smith -- grew up in Brooklyn, the oldest of twelve siblings. His first play was a production of Free to Be You and Me, in fifth grade. " 'It's all right to cry,' " he sings softly, grinning. "Caught the bug. I was like, 'Yeah. This I can do.' " He attended a performing-arts high school in New York, where he worshipped at the altar of playwrights Edward Albee and Harold Pinter and Public Enemy and De La Soul. "There was never really any separation for me," says Mos. "I'd be in drama class, and before drama class I'd be writing rhymes or in the yard battling."

By the late Eighties, Mos was a working actor. He did an anti-smoking PSA (using the money he earned to buy a carton of cigarettes) and some short-lived TV work -- playing Nell Carter's son, Bill Cosby's sidekick.

Around that time, he began rapping in New York's Washington Square Park -- then a venue for hungry young MCs including John Forte and Talib Kweli. A decade later, Mos would record two of the Nineties' most acclaimed hip-hop records: 1998's Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are . . . Black Star and his 1999 solo album, Black on Both Sides. As for the origins of Black Jack Johnson, Mos shrugs and explains, "I was mad at Fred Durst. Him and all those 'Yo! Yo!' white cats pissed me off pretty good. I wanted to make a rock record that really utilized both the elements of rock and hip-hop. I wanted something with the kind of energy that you could play on [New York hip-hop station] Hot 97 but that would still rock out. See, hip-hop is rock & roll. What the hell is Wu-Tang but Motorhead? What's Mobb Deep? It's rock & roll shit."

Mos has finished his appetizer-size pizza, having left behind a plateful of crusts. He lights another Dunhill. He says he likes the White Stripes, the Strokes, 'NSync, Tool, N.E.R.D. He loves System of a Down ("It's like opera"). He's not particularly concerned about the music industry's response to his rock move. "It's like caring what a roomful of jerks thinks about you," he mutters. "What do I care? These are the same people, like Tommy Mottola, after hearing Lauryn Hill's record, saying, 'I don't hear any hits.' Or Berry Gordy not signing Aretha Franklin. So I don't care what they have to say. They sound like Charlie Brown's mother when they're talking to me. We've got Hot 97. And [New York rock station] K-Rock embraces it, too. We got 'em. I mean, this sounds like some real Muhammad Ali shit, doesn't it?" He laughs. "But we do."

[From Issue 896 — May 23, 2002]