New York Theatre Workshop

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...