Roger Guenveur Smith Photo by Caroline Yang

Smith has a long list of credits in film and television and on stage. He made his film debut in 1988 in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, the same year his friend Basquiat passed away from a heroin overdose. Smith's stage credits include three previous appearances at Penumbra, all of which he both wrote and performed in: the one-man plays Frederick Douglass Now, and Rodney King, and Inside the Creole Mafia, which he co-wrote and performed with Mark Broyard. Having seen the first two listed above, I expected going in to In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat to see a dramatic work devised with a blend of poetic vision and searing reality, and I was not disappointed.

In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat feels less like a play than a meditation, told with great reverence, love, and a touch of anger. The piece tightly integrates Smith's text with the sound design created by Marc Anthony Thompson, Smith's frequent collaborator. Thompson uses the musical genres that were backdrops to Basquiat's life–jazz, hip-hop, beat-box, blues–along with sounds of city streets, sounds of nature, and tonal chords that suggest the pulsations of life. In concert with the sound score, Smith delivers droplets of facts and insights into Basquiat's life, most often in hushed tones. Smith expresses anger–about the inequities that a young Black man inevitably encounters and about a friend lost too soon–without raising his voice or agitating his physical presence, but through subtle turns in his consistent soft delivery, through silent pauses, and eyes lifted up, as if asking "why?"

Smith makes connections between all manner of elements in the constellation that surrounded Basquiat's star. His Haitian father fled Haiti with attitudes based on the violence inflicted by the dictator Duvalier on the Haitian people, and these attitudes had bearing on his expectations for Jean-Michel, his oldest surviving child (an older brother died the same year Jean-Michel was born). At age seven he was already drawing human forms when he sustained serious injuries being hit by a car on the street. To keep him occupied during his hospitalization, his art-loving mother brought him a copy of "Gray's Anatomy" that the boy read to inform his drawing precision. We hear about the young artist's life on the street, first as a runaway and then kicked out by his father for dropping out of school, and how that young man of no means created a life of art-making that brought him into the inner sanctums of the art world, being taken up by Andy Warhol as a protégé, and earning $1.4 million a year by his mid-twenties.

It was during a period when Basquiat lived in Los Angeles that he met Smith in a dance hall, and Smith draws parallels between their meeting and the meeting of Basquiat's parents in a Brooklyn dance hall. For every aspect of Basquiat's life, Smith draws connections–parallel incidents, events that occurred in the same year or at the same age as other people. On occasion, Smith adopts the guise of another person with such a connection, such as the unctuous auctioneer who sells a Basquiat painting for $110.5 million dollars and a bereaved woman kneeling at the cemetery near Smith, one mourning a sister lost to cancer, the other a friend lost to the weight and speed of his life. Smith drops each new morsel of information upon us like a tear drop, a tear that encompasses both joy and grief.

Surprisingly, we are not told a great deal about Basquiat's art itself. Nor are there any projected images of Basquiat's work. Yes, we hear about its origins as graffiti, the primary media being spray paint and blank walls, and that its themes are challenges to the social, economic, and racial status quo, often making satiric jabs at the power structures. But the focus is on the man and his passion, and not the artifacts he left behind. It is ironic–an irony that Basquiat seemed aware of–that it was the well-heeled subject he was satirizing who were spending millions of dollars to add his work to their private collections.

Throughout the performance, which runs just under an hour, Smith seldom moves his feet, standing in one spot as if immobilized by the profundity of his subject. He does, however, shift his hips, wave his arms, and adjust his facial composition, all to brilliant effect. In addition to Thompson's essential contributions to this production, Wu Chen Khoo has designed beautiful lighting changes that illuminate, in different hues, a subtle but evocative scenic backdrop painted by Seitu Jones, with the outlined three-point crown that Basquiat often used in his work to mark the subject as a hero.

Smith does not offer a reason for presenting this program, honoring a man who was a radically innovative artist as well as his dear friend, at this time. Perhaps there is never a wrong time to pay tribute to such a man. Still, considering that it has been thirty-six years since Basquiat's untimely death, if Smith was moved by some current impulse, whether within his own life or external to himself, acknowledging this might have given the show an added sense of urgency and purpose.

And yet, there is no denying the beauty and strength embedded in Smith's text and delivery, nor the stirring integration of words, gesture, sound and light to create a coherent whole, itself a work of art. In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat is a beautiful piece of stagecraft that transmits a hero's journey to our eyes, our ears, and our hearts.

In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat runs through October 27, 2024, at Penumbra Theatre, 270 North Kent Street, Saint Paul MN. For tickets and information, please call call 651-224-3180 or visit www.penumbratheatre.org.

Playwright and Director: Roger Guenveur-Smith; Sound Designer: Mark Anthony Thompson; Scenic Painter: Seitu Jones; Lighting Designer: Wu Chen Khoo; Stage Manager: Ronald Alois Schulz; Assistant Stage Manager: Constance Brevell.

Cast: Roger Guenveur-Smith

Reviewed by Arty Dorman