![]() ![]() His extensive screen credits also include “Eve’s Bayou,” and HBO’s “K Street” and “Oz.”Īsk him about the Twin Cities, and he’s quick to point out that he’s presented more work in Minnesota than any other place outside New York and Los Angeles. He has appeared in a raft of Lee’s films, including “Do the Right Thing” (he played Smiley, the heroic stutterer), “Malcolm X,” “School Daze,” “He Got Game” and “Get on the Bus.” Smith just wrapped a shoot for Lee’s “Chiraq,” co-starring his Yale Drama schoolmate Angela Bassett. Smith’s roster of solo shows also includes “Juan and John,” about baseball players Juan Marichal and John Roseboro “Frederick Douglass Now,” inspired by the 19th-century abolitionist and statesman, and “Who Killed Bob Marley?” about the reggae icon, who was his friend. That one-act was turned into an award-winning film by Spike Lee, Smith’s frequent collaborator. Newton Story,” about the revolutionary and writer who co-founded the Black Panther Party. Smith, who grew up in California and graduated from Occidental College and the Yale School of Drama, won a raft of awards, including an Obie, for his 1995 solo show, “A Huey P. “Rodney King” is the latest work of a protean artist of stage and screen. In the show, Smith educates audiences by going into King’s history while touching on characters such as police officers and neighbors as well as Reginald Denny, a white man beaten at the outset of the riots. ‘Rodney Glen King’ was on his license, but the person we call Rodney King is a media construction.” For example, his family called him Glen, his middle name. “It was all televised for our consumption, neatly so, and yet there is so much we don’t know about him. Smith said the beating of King, and the riots that ensued after an all-white jury acquitted four of the officers who pummeled him, was America’s first reality TV show. “It’s important to have artist commentary on social justice issues, and we wanted to celebrate Roger’s innovation and courage as he serves as the conscience of our nation.” “We brought this show to the Twin Cities to revisit the trauma of what happened then and to open space for conversation around what’s happening across the country now,” said Penumbra co-artistic director Sarah Bellamy. Smith describes the production as “more prayer than performance” - an attempt to find the grace notes as he orbits the legacy of a searching, flawed man who unexpectedly became a focal point for social justice issues that remain timely. ![]() Within weeks, Smith was onstage at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theatre, his artistic home, testing out the seeds of what would become “Rodney King.” The one-hour solo show, which kicks off Penumbra Theatre’s season in a two-week run starting Thursday, has been hailed as “hypnotic” (New York Times) and “intensely cathartic” (Washington Post). “I wanted to know why he mattered so much to me, and in such a personal way.” He shelved his other projects and plunged into research about King. “I felt as if I’d lost a blood brother,” said Smith. police officers, had been found at the bottom of his backyard pool. ![]() The lifeless body of Rodney King, a semiliterate construction worker who unexpectedly became a byword for racial tumult after his 1991 videotaped beating by white L.A. On Father’s Day three years ago, actor, playwright and director Roger Guenveur Smith was at home in Los Angeles working on a show about the dad of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank when he popped open his laptop to news that stunned him. ![]()
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