Off Broadway review by Tim Teeman
The Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to fame in the 1980s for colorful, scribbly, densely symbolic paintings that bridged the gap between street art and the gallery world. But Basquiat’s aesthetic is minimalist in Roger Guenveur Smith’s arresting solo show In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The most striking piece of Raphael Mishler’s stage design is a doorway: an alternately lit and darkened space that suggests a portal to the past, or a boundary between us and the celestial.
Other dualities—between distance and intimacy, life and death, art and commerce—pervade Smith’s quietly shattering piece of remembrance and reclamation. Barefoot and dressed in a chic suit, the writer-performer-director recalls his first encounters with Basquiat and the latter’s subsequent flowering as an artist, “writing acrylic poems and philosophy on concrete walls and canvas and refrigerator doors.” And he weaves his memories of Basquiat into broader examinations of race, legacy, culture and history; in Smith’s account, systems of anti-Black oppression and violence thrum alongside Black resistance and artistic excellence.
In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
Smith is an old hand at biographical theater: He won an Obie Award in 1996 for his depiction of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, and his Bessie award-winning Rodney King, directed by Spike Lee, is available on Netflix. But this is not a conventional bioplay or a lecture about the well-documented highs and lows of Basquiat’s brief life and career. (He died of an accidental heroin overdose in 1988, at the age of 27.) In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat is more personal and impressionistic: a play of profound connections and echoes, with subtle lighting by Arlo Sanders and live sound design by Smith’s longtime collaborator Marc Anthony Thompson, who stands at the side of the stage.
Smith begins his monologue with the story of his own father’s reaction when Smith told him he wanted to be an artist. “You think you’re so goddamn clever/You know if Van Gogh was Negro/He would have cut off more than his ear.” (As for Basquiat: “Hell that boy didn’t live long enough/To see his shit really sell.”) As he speaks, Smith remains still with the occasional flourish of hand gestures adding a physical edge to his address.
In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat | Photograph: Courtesy Marcus Middleton
Tragedy is rarely far from the story Smith tells: Basquiat’s father moved to Brooklyn in 1955, the year that the Black teenager Emmett Till was lynched in Missississipi; when Basquiat was born in Brooklyn five years later, there was a deadly airplane collision over the borough. And when Basquiat died, Smith tells us, there was a fire at the Empire State Building. But the play’s final image celebrates life. Emerging from a black limousine on a cobblestone street, Basquiat reunites with his father: a moment of pride, success and power that Smith encapsulates in a smile of pure joy.
In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. New York Theatre Workshop (Off Broadway). By Roger Guenveur Smith. Directed by Smith. With Smith. Running time: 1hr. No intermission.
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In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
