In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Interview with Roger Guenveur Smith

It began on the dance floor. Late one night in an LA Club Jean-Michel Basquiat danced up to Roger Guenveur Smith and proclaimed, “I like your energy”. From there a friendship was born. In many ways it seemed the two lived parallel lives while growing up on opposite sides of the country, Basquiat in Brooklyn, and Smith in Los Angeles. They both shared a love of Twain, encyclopedias, and were passionate about confronting issues of race, justice and fairness through their art. Both came from families who migrated to places they felt would offer more opportunities for their children. Roger’s father came from Virginia to California, and Jean-Michel’s from Haiti to New York.

Jean-Michele went on to become one of the most revered visual artists of all time. Roger became an Obie winning actor and playwright, creating indelible characters such as Smiley in “Do the Right Thing” (to name but one of the projects he’s worked on with longtime collaborator Spike Lee), Frederick Douglass and Huey P. Newton. Maybe it was fate, maybe coincidence but the friendship lasted until Basquiat’s premature death at age 27.

In “In Honor of Jean-Michele Basquiat” Roger Guenveur Smith brings the Jean-Michele he knew to life. It is a stunning portrait of an artist of great genius, but also great humanity. Over the course of the evening we also come to know the show’s creator himself as his life and career’s upward trajectory mirrors that of his friend. It is currently running at NY Theatre Workshop Until Sunday October 11th. It was a great privilege to sit down with him and talk about solo theatre, friendship and what art has to offer us in chaotic times.

Wendy-Lane Bailey: Jean-Michele Basquiat was someone whose art we are familiar with, but we don’t really know the person behind it. You did the thing that I love the most in a show like this. So often when people attempt a story about someone who died tragically they start at the end with the manner of death. Instead you let us know this person before we get to the end. He becomes real to us, we can see ourselves, our friends, our family in him, which makes the ending so much more powerful. And your ending was heartbreakingly beautiful, the reunion with his father left us feeling sad but hopeful.

Roger Guenveur Smith: That's a beautiful moment that I had always imagined. I obviously was not there. I was there for virtually all of those stories that I told, but that was the one that I had to imagine. I had a very clear and magical sense of of what happened in that moment. Imaginatively it works not only for the ascendance of of the prodigal son returning as it were, but really a kind of a bookend to my own story.

Interesting that here are two young men from opposite ends of the country who essentially had a replicated relationship with the father figure. You know, Gérard [Basquiat’s Father] came to Brooklyn from Haiti with great ambition. My father came to California from Virginia with great ambition, and I think that both of them were very concerned about where their respective sons are going to to fit in, in this very challenging society, in this very challenging country.

WLB: What attracts you to solo performance, particularly with this story?

RGS: This was initiated through a series of improvisations that were done for the Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum initially, and then that went to MoCA in Los Angeles, which is my hometown. I did improvised chat about my relationship with Jean-Michel, telling some of the stories. We did a couple of memorial events on what would have been his 50th birthday in Los Angeles. But I felt that I needed to lock myself up in a room and and really write this out properly to script it. I think it deserved that, and I knew that I was the only person who could possibly tell these stories.

Once I had done that draft, I invited my longtime colleague Mark Anthony Thompson into the room to to start scoring this thing. The thing that inspired both of us, both Mark Anthony and me, was Jean-Michel's playlist. He had an extraordinary record collection, and it would have been CDs and and cassettes at that time as well. If you were in his studio, which I was fairly frequently on on both East and West Coast, there was never a moment when music was not playing. We had a good sense of rhythm, a good sense of harmony that Jean-Michele was working with. We tried to allow that to in inform this new piece,

WLB: The music added a lot. Even in the the pre-show, with Eartha Kitt’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” playing right before you enter and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” playing as the house lights come back up the variety of music created a really wonderful atmosphere.

RGS: Oh, good! I'm glad you were listening, because I think one of the things that that Mark Anthony does so brilliantly is kind of clear the audience's palate before the show even starts. The so-called show. I think that the show starts actually as soon as you come into the room and you're listening to ESG, you're listening to MariaCallas, you're listening to Buckka White, you're listening to the Lounge Lizards, you're listening to you James White and the Blacks, you’re listening to Billie Holiday and Eartha Kitt. Apparently that song, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy, that Cole Porter song, was a favorite of Jean Michel's, and he would play it over and over and over again in the studio.Considering the paternal themes in the piece, it made sense to Mark Anthony and me to have that be the penultimate prologue song.

WLB: I can see the the improv roots of the show because it feels like you're riffing, but I can also see the structure and the arc of it.

RGS: I'm glad that I that you you saw it like that, you felt it like that. We aspire to what I think Jean-Michel achieved so brilliantly, which is this amazing absorption of of Western and African tradition. The absorption of Grey's Anatomy, for example, which was a gift from his mom. He essentially memorized the entire textbook when he was in the hospital as a seven-year-old. Then of course, you know the jazz influences and the improvisational impulses, and the fury. The rage, the very dark humor that would compel one to rip a Confederate flag off the back of somebody's jean jacket, and stomp on it. It's a true story,

WLB: That story is a moment that tells us so much about who Jean-Michel was and what he valued. This soft spoken man, out at a club dancing, and he sees a man wearing a Confederate Flag on the back of his jacket and he tears it right off.

RGS: And he laughed and kept dancing.

WLB: I want to talk a little bit about you specifically. You are a Yale School of Drama alum, but before that you got a degree in history. What set you down that path, and how has that informed your work as an artist?

RGS: I was an American Studies major at Occidental College in Los Angeles. When I was looking for a project to do as a senior honors project, I wanted to combine my interests in performance, history and biography. That led to my first solo performance, in which I was Frederick Douglass. Douglass's narrative was on our shelf at home. I read it. I didn't know all the words in it, I was a child when I read it. But obviously, it made an impression on me, the imagery in that in that narrative.

Then I wanted to do a Ph.D. in history at Yale. I started that and worked with some great people, but I always had this hankering for performance. I auditioned for the drama school, and I was accepted miraculously into a dynamic class, which included Angela Bassett and Charles Dutton, and this guy named John Tuturro. Interestingly enough, all four of us wound up working together in Spike Lee movies. So Spike kind of poached our our class.

I was also influenced by Hal Holbrook, Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain. I saw it on PBS, and it really fascinated me that an actor could take on a historical character and make that character live and breathe and speak to the present moment. Interestingly, at the same time that I was absorbing Holbrook play Twain, I was doing the first 15 pages of Tom Sawyer in speech contests, in parochial school speech contests in Los Angeles. The Twain connection is very odd, especially connected with Jean Michel. There's a great interview with him where they ask him, "What are you reading these days? And he says, "Mostly Mark Twain.” How is it that these boys on either end of of the nation were absorbed by Mark Twain? It's uncanny. I don't know if you know that Mark Twain was born at Halley's Comet and died at Halley's Comet. So, in in a way, his life, like Jean Michel's, came in and went out in a ball of flame.

I felt really compelled to tell these stories, and if you were listening, and I and I think that you were listening very deeply, you know that there's a 36 club within within that story. All these people died at 36, and I said, "Why 36, Roger? Why 36?” And I realized that it had been 36 years since I lost Jean-Michele

WLB: You perform the show Barefoot. Was that a deliberate choice?

RGS: It's odd because, there's that iconic photograph of Jean in the New York Times magazine.He's sitting there in a beautiful suit, very comfortable in his studio, and he's barefoot. There's that iconic thing, but I wasn't necessarily going to do that. What happened when we did it in the shoes that I was going to perform in, I left at home. I came to the theater in my sneakers, and I said, "Well, I can't do this show in sneakers, so I'll have to do it barefoot” and that's how that started. I think it was an accident that was meant to happen. I like working barefoot. I think that the feet can be just as expressive as the hand, and in this particular piece, to feel grounded in in that way is a good feeling, particularly because I don't I don't move away from that microphone. That's one of the obstacles of of the piece choreographically, to maintain oneself in that spot.

WLB: What do you feel that the media and popular culture have gotten wrong about Jean-Michel?

RGS: I overheard someone say at the end of one show as this patron was walking out, "Oh, I didn't know he was black. I thought he was French.”

It is so darkly, almost humorous, were it not so darkly ignorant. But I think that that's kind of an important thing that folks forgot that he lived in an internal and external world of African Atlantic Achievement. He grew up in a household that was almost entirely Spanish speaking because of his mom and her extended family. Then there was his father and Creole and French and English and all of the different musics that they were listening to in his home. He was an extraordinarily civilized New Yorker who skipped school and you know went to the Met, went to MoMA, absorbed everything, took notes, did sketches. He passed at age 27. There was a lot, more to come.I suppose that that's another reason why Mark Anthony and I have settled on doing what we're doing. Mark Anthony probably more reluctantly than I, because he felt in the early going that. The crown, as it were, was just overly ubiquitous, and that the Basquiat brand had become commercialized to the point that there was there was not room for any kind of truth. There was not room for any kind of meaning. So we we had to we had to find that. Really had to find that. We had to trust ourselves. We had to give ourselves permission to do that.

WLB: One of the things you say in the show that has stayed with me is that he knew as a black artist he had a target on his back.

RGS: I think that he was-he was conscious of the dilemma. He was conscious of the danger. He was very moved by the loss of Michael Stewart. As was I, and I wasn't even in New York. I was rapping in L.A. I do a rap in the show that I that I did back then. They popped his eyes right out of his head, and the reason why they popped his eyes out of his head was to bleach his eye eyeballs because he had been put in a chokehold so severe that his eyeballs were completely bloodshot. They took his eyes out of his skull and they put it in bleach and then they placed the eyeballs back in his skull. That inspired me to rap what I was rapping, and that inspired Jean-Michel to paint what he was painting. And at the same time we were both engaged in this group called Artists Against Apartheid. The character that I created for “Do the Right Thing” was very much inspired by Jean Michel, and I didn't even realize it at the time. The great tragedy of that was that he he died when we were doing the film in Brooklyn. He was just across the river, expiring, living and dying as a real artist, and I'm over there playing an artist.

WLB: you have limned this portrait of a real vulnerable human being who had a great talent, but also like all of us had great flaws, and had friends and family,who were important to him.

RGS: There's some beautiful ideas of family that I hope that I have imparted in the piece. His mom in the hospital pointing to the page that has the heart in it and trying to instruct him about how to how to draw a heart. Of course, the reunion with his father, the way that his parents met on a on a dance floor, flying kites with his his little sisters, throwing snowballs. Allowing him to to be connected to this thing called life, humanity.

WLB: What do you think theater at this difficult time we find ourselves in has to offer?

RGS: I think theater is essential, and I think that it's interesting that one of the first targets of of the present regime has been theater, and the struggle for theater, the struggle against theater, and what is it? What kind of theater is it that we want? How is theater now going to resonate in this American Civilization and this American uncivilization?

One of the great emergences in the last dozen years has been this phenomenon called Hamilton. It continues to resonate in the American imagination, and figuring out how that happened is just as important as recognizing what happened. You have to start with this thing called literacy. You have to start with this thing called a liberal arts education, in which somebody went to a place called Wesleyan, and was able to read and write critically and imaginatively. To absorb a book which could have just been a doorstop, and find within it a way of telling an old story in a new way, with a whole new cast of people, and a way of employing a generation of of artists who otherwise would not have been employed and continue to be employed. That's a great achievement, and something that is sorely lacking in the ambition of our current regime, which is ahistorical, which has no interest in uplifting the craft, the employment of a generation of of artists. In fact, wanting to shut places down. I have performed the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian. That's on my resume. When that is threatened, I take it Very personally, but I think that the nation should should take it very personally and recognize what the the gravity of this of of this crisis. So, that said, theater now more than ever. The campfire has to expand.

WLB: My last question for you is: What do you have to say to aspiring solo performers?

RGS: I say a lot to them because I teach a course called in performing history in which my students are encouraged to dig into the archives of their choice. There's a next phase of that work called Autobiography in Progress, in which the source material, the archival material, is the material of the self. So, in essence, I'm passing the baton on to the next generation to do what I've been trying to do for a while now. I think my lesson there, my my words of wisdom - don't forget to breathe, be true unto thine own self, to thine own self be true. Be imaginative, and know that there are no rules, except that one must tell the truth, and there are different ways of of doing that. I'd like to think that I can tell a lot of this work without words. That silence and stillness can work just as effectively as as noise and cacophony and break dancing, spinning on one's head. It's nice to spin on one's head, but you don't have to do it all the time. Listening, listening is is paramount. Observation is paramount.

In Honor of Jean-Michele Basquiat runs through Monday, 10/12, at NY Theatre Workshop. For tickets, visit https://www.nytw.org/show/basquiat/tickets/.