Born in 1955 in California, Smith has worked in several movies, including Malcolm X, Poetic Justice, etc. Roger Guenveur Smith is an American actor, and director best known for his collaborations with Spike Lee. Roger Guenveur Smith and LeTania’s Relationship Is Lowkey.Roger Guenveur Smith’s Wife, A Certified Yoga Instructor.With the pauses and ellipses and its kind of fractured sense, it remains one of the great American speeches. He responded with an improvised, extemporaneous speech.
ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH TRIAL
And it came from a man who was not trained as a public speaker, who was brain damaged, who had the woeful experience of sitting through a trial and having to witness those four officers being acquitted. Rodney King’s speech is one of the great American speeches, delivered May Day 1992, and it stopped a riot. King - but never in a comedic fashion. . . I chanted, “Burn, baby, burn,” exactly what I’d heard on the streets.įor along time I’ve been referencing Mr. I took Marichal’s baseball card out of my collection and burned it.
And the next week I was watching the Dodgers and Giants on TV, and I saw Juan Marichal hit John Roseboro, one of my heroes, with a baseball bat. I had just witnessed Western Avenue, which is where my parents’ business was, go up in flames.
I was born in Berkeley, but I grew up in L.A., and the ’65 and ’92 riots are a kind of bracketing of my childhood and younger adulthood. riots were particularly influential for you?Ī. We also had Frederick Douglass’s “ Narrative Life,” and that became my first solo performance. My mom had a two-volume set called “ The World’s Great Men of Color,” and I was kind of obsessed with that book. As a child I read the Encyclopedia Britannica for fun. I have had an ongoing interest in history and biography. How did you get interested in performing history?Ī. Eventually the autopsy report emerged, and I was able to reference that as well. I depended on what most of us depend on these days, the Internet, to get a sense of this man. Newton Story” or “John and Juan”, I didn’t try to investigate Rodney King from the inside out. I maintained the perspective of the outsider. It was just weeks after Rodney King passed that I started this work.
ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH SERIES
So it was a series of questions I started asking on stage of the Bootleg Theater, my home theater in Los Angeles. His loss was a mystery I wanted to go about unraveling. I had referenced Rodney King for 20 years in my work, but I’d never met him. Early this week, he explained why historical figures such as Rodney King - a troubled figure with addiction problems who in 2012 was found dead in his swimming pool, shortly after the publication of his book “ The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption” - keep catching his attention.Ī. Smith has already toured the show from Los Angeles to New York and Amsterdam. “Another occasion to extol the magnificence of Roger Guenveur Smith’s solo wizardry,” the Los Angeles Times wrote last fall of Smith’s “Rodney King.” “Nearly as impassioned and insightful as ‘ Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,’ ” the New York Times declared in January. Smith goes to Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company for the next two weeks with his solo show “Rodney King,” an exploration of the man whose videotaped beating by the Los Angeles police led to riots when the officers were acquitted - a moment that famously gave the culture King’s “Can we all get along?”
insider drama that came and went on HBO a decade before “ House of Cards” and “ Scandal” turned dirty politics into guilty chic TV. Newton Story” and “Frederick Douglass Now,” while his screen credits include Spike Lee joints (“ Do the Right Thing,” “ Get on the Bus”) and Steven Soderbergh’s “K Street,” the D.C. His one-man stage shows include “A Huey P. Actor and solo performer Roger Guenveur Smithlikes his topics hot.
0 kommentar(er)
