A Tribute to Basquiat That Burns Bright but Flares Out

The actor, writer, and director Roger Guenveur Smith has previously won acclaim with one-man shows recognizing figures ranging from Black Panthers co-founder Huey P. Newton to Rodney King to Otto Frank, Anne’s father. For his latest outing, Mr. Smith, a stage and screen veteran also noted for his work with Spike Lee, has found a subject he knew as a friend and collaborator: Jean-Michel Basquiat, the neo-expressionist painter who blazed a brilliant career before dying of a heroin overdose at just 27 years old.Basquiat, who first gained attention as a street artist, served as inspiration for Smiley, the stuttering character Mr. Smith played in Mr. Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,” who first appears while drawing on a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. That item becomes highly symbolic towards the end, when Smiley burns down a pizzeria after a black man has been killed by a police officer.Fire and race both play substantial roles in “In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” the hour-long solo piece that Mr. Smith has brought back to New York Theatre Workshop, where it was introduced earlier this year as part of the city’s annual Under the Radar Theater Festival. Mr. Smith points out that only days before Basquiat was born in December 1960 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, his neighborhood became the partial site of a plane crash that killed more than 130 people.On the day Basquiat died, we’re later reminded — August 12, 1988 — a fire broke out in the Empire State Building. “Jean’s life inaugurated and extinguished in a crucible of flame,” Mr. Smith intones, aiming, as he does throughout “Basquiat,” to capture his subject’s flair for vivid, dramatic imagery through words and rhythm.We learn that Mr. Smith was, in fact, rapping in a Los Angeles dance hall when he met Basquiat, under the name Hollywatts, a hybrid meant to combine the “two mythologies” of Hollywood and Watts, an urban neighborhood that gained national attention after an uprising against police in the summer of 1965.“Basquiat” is delivered, accordingly, in rhyme or near-rhyme, with Mr. Smith adapting, or at least aspiring to, the fluidity of great hip-hop artists. He certainly matches the bombast of some, segueing from hushed tones to lines that ring with indignation and sarcasm, his arms waving as if simulating a modern dancer, though at times the movement is more suggestive of swimming.This sense of grandiosity is accompanied by a tendency to conflate the trajectories of black Americans who have contributed so much to this country, and the world, in capacities as diverse as their lives and often tragic deaths. At one point, Mr. Smith mentions Bob Marley and psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who both succumbed to cancer (leukemia, in Fanon’s case), just before referencing the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. — and invoking “the ghost of Michael Stewart,” a victim of alleged police brutality.After his curtain call at the preview I attended, Mr. Smith called out an audience member who got up to leave before he could deliver additional remarks, joking — I think — that you had to pay to get out. The actor then introduced a post-show speaker, but without the customary invitation to stick around, which also serves as permission to take off if you choose or need to do so. This led to a staggered, awkward exit.I suspect that Basquiat, and most of the other iconic artists, pioneers, and leaders duly celebrated in this work, would have handled the matter with more grace.

A Tribute to Basquiat That Burns Bright but Flares Out

A Tribute to Basquiat That Burns Bright but Flares Out

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