![]() “There were all kinds of strange coincidences and cross-references,” he said. In researching the subject of his piece, Smith uncovered other unsettling narrative echoes within King’s own story. Smith in “Rodney King.” (Photo by Patti McGuire)Įerily, in both cases, the young black men whose stops for reckless driving incited the riots-Marquette Frye in ’65 and King in ’92-led troubled lives thereafter, and like King, Frye died young, at age 42. And both famously metastasized into full-blown urban uprisings, complete with fires, vandalism and retributive violence on both sides. conflicts that began behind the wheel, with California Highway Patrol traffic stops of African-American drivers that escalated, with the arrival of the notoriously paramilitary LAPD, into bruising struggles. kid, a Dodger fan.”Ī sun-kissed youth in the City of Angels had its flip side: “The riots were the bookends of my childhood and my younger adulthood,” he said, referring to the one in Watts in 1965 and the one that engulfed much of L.A. at a young enough age that considers himself “an L.A. Smith, though born in Berkeley, Calif., was moved to L.A. ![]() Why did this guy matter to me? I never met him, but he’s someone who always had my sympathies.” “It was shocking I was very moved,” Smith said of King’s death. It was only a few months later, Smith said, that he was up onstage workshopping an early version of the show. Smith recalled being devastated by the news of King’s death in 2012 King drowned at age 47 in his own backyard pool after a night of heavy drinking, not long after he published an autobiography and went on a successful media tour to promote it. We recognize early on that this was a kind of seminal moment in human relations.” Indeed, at the KAOS Gallery in Leimert Park in 1991, Smith recalled, “I did an improvised piece right after he was beaten, which eerily enough kind of predicted what would happen: that the cops wouldn’t be convicted. “I had referenced Rodney King in my work for 20 years,” said Smith, whose history-based solo works have also included A Huey P. Smith in “Frederick Douglass Now.” (Photo by Justin Zsebe) In Frederick Douglass Now, Smith repurposes Douglass’s writings to address contemporary American issues in Rodney King, he interrogates the late beating victim in a kind of rhetorical vacuum, then delivers his entire impromptu speech-the one that began, “People, I just want to say, Can we all get along?” Between the two men’s stories (and their famous speeches) gapes more than a century of African-American struggle, progress and retrenchment, and the narrative is far from linear. 3-7, after acclaimed runs across the country ( Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in D.C., L.A.’s Bootleg Theater, NY’s Under the Radar Festival).īut the historical distance between King, a construction worker famously beaten by the LAPD but ultimately defeated by drug and alcohol abuse, and Douglass, the brilliant and hugely influential 19 th-century orator, is clearly the gap that is haunting Smith. riots, back to New York for a short run at Brooklyn’s BRIC House, Dec. And, he might add, between the East and West Coasts: Smith will bring his solo show Rodney King, about the unfortunate figure at the center of the wrenching 1992 L.A. “This year has been all about going back and forth between Rodney King and Frederick Douglass,” said writer/performer Roger Guenveur Smith in a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |