Roger Guenveur Smith delivers a singular first-person monologue that blends memoir, history, and jazz-inflected jam poetry. In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat is not your typical solo show. For one thing, Smith is not entirely alone on the spare stage of the New York Theatre Workshop. Marc Anthony Thompson sits upstage left behind a full array of sound panels providing live sound design, a backing track of sorts that amplifies Smith’s voice and punctuates his speech.
Smith, standing barefoot behind a mic in a phonebooth-size square of light, unleashes a torrent of words that detail his experience growing up in Los Angeles, his career as a rapper named Hollywatts, his long association with the legendary painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and filmmaker Spike Lee, and the political underpinnings of all of their work.
In Basquiat’s studio in Venice, California, in the 1980s, Smith found a kindred spirit who also defied his strict and practical-minded father’s admonition against pursuing a career in the arts. “Go to some professional school,” he recalls his father telling him near the top of the show. “You get something they cannot take away.” (Smith wound up getting a degree from Yale Drama School before finding success as an actor and director.)
That friendship proved seminal, leading to his heavily improvisational portrayal of artist/arsonist Smiley in Lee’s 1989 breakout film Do the Right Thing. Both Basquiat and Lee were inspired by the tragic 1983 killing of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old street artist who died after a brutal beating in NYPD custody. “That could have been me,” Smith recalls Basquiat telling him before the painter created the masterpiece “Defacement” and a series of canvases grappling with the effects of police brutality against Black Americans. Meanwhile, Smith explains that Lee chose as his Do the Right Thing protagonist “the ghost of Michael Stewart” in the form of Bill Nunn’s boombox-toting Radio Raheem.
Smith is a magician with wordcraft, as when he describes his hangs in Basquiat’s studio: “He’s stomping on canvas, his Air Jordans are grounded while Charlie Parker, Bird, flies high on the boombox. Riff after riff after riff Eartha Kitt after riff. Caution, don’t get paint on the spliff.”
This is language elevated to the syncopated freedom of a jazz solo, that simultaneously celebrates the frantic energy of artistic creation. In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat is fascinating, discursive, poetic — and delivered in about an hour with the barefoot confidence of a veteran sideman from some smoky downtown club. ★★★★☆
IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
New York Theatre Workshop, Off Broadway
Running time: 60 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through October 4 for $54 to $84