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In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat
In his mesmerizing one-man show at New York Theatre Workshop, Roger Guenveur-Smith cobbles together a thematically ordered series of stylized vignettes. His highly visual word images of his encounters and impressions of the quixotic, philosophical artist Jean-MichelBasquiat resonate with love.
Importantly, Guenveur-Smith illuminates Basquiat as an icon in the pantheon of Black artists/musicians who confronted the pathological, racist dynamic of white American culture. This is a necessary reckoning if we consider the current sociopolitical climate.
Enthusiastic Response Prompts Extension
The Obie Award-winning actor, playwright and director’s solo presentation follows his acclaimed sold-out run during the Under the Radar Festival. Guenveur-Smith’s profound, personal work about Basquiat and his legacy has once more connected with audiences. Their enthusiasm prompted the show’s extension through October 10, 2026.
With superb live sound design by Marc Anthony Thompson and Ario Sanders’ atmospheric, symbolic lighting, the one-hour show zips by. In fact Guenveur-Smith leaves one wishing for more. He stands barefoot in a natty suit on an empty stage, a doorway (part of Raphael Mishler’s scenic design) suggesting an otherworldly entrance/exit.
Immersive
At the mic, Guenveur-Smith infuses his poetic delivery with an accompanying choreography of subtle movements. At times his subject possesses him. Basquiat’s presence feels palpable. The audience is subtly plunged and fully immersed in the colors of sound and words melding in nuanced rhymes and rhythms.
Gradually the solo performance draws us in. First, Guenveur-Smith expresses the wisdom and encouragement his father gave him when he launched his own career as an actor. Humorously, his father reminds him of the challenges of Black identity. “You think you’re so goddamn clever / You know if Van Gogh was Negro / He would have cut off more than his ear.” Also, his dad suggests the commercial world’s exploitation. “Hell that boy didn’t live long enough / To see his shit really sell.”
In a vignette Guenveur-Smith ironically conducts an auction for Basquiat’s “Untitled” which sold for $110.5 million dollars.
Additionally, the father chides son Roger, “You go ahead, be an actor / But you’ll never act yourself out of this coffin called the US of A.” Finally, with love he uplifts him. “Be the best actor you can possibly be / And before it’s all over son, why don’t you act something out for your friend Jean-Michel and for me.”
Unlike Van Gogh, Basquiat did see his success translate into wads of money (which he preferred to receive as cash). Unfortunately, it also sped him more quickly to his death, which Guenveur-Smith narrowly pinpoints, then moves on to more lyricism. The money afforded Basquiat greater access to heroin and to an overdose at an age Basquiat uncannily predicted on canvas when he was 21.
Hanging out with Basquiat in L.A.
Guenveur-Smith’s lyrical account illuminates the man whose candle lit up the skies then was extinguished by his own hands in 1988 at 27. Initially, the two met at an L.A. dance hall in 1982. Guenveur-Smith, rapping under the name “Hollywatts” (Hollywood and Watts), hooked up with Basquiat at the artist’s career’s first blossoming.
Rather than examine Basquiat’s lineage in Neo-expressionism or define him as an appendage of Andy Warhol, Guenveur-Smith uniquely personalizes his friend. His compelling metaphoric images stick in one’s mind. For example, when he and Basquiat met, he thought the artist was just “a cool kid with an electronic hairdo.” He didn’t know Basquiat was “incognegro numero uno writing acrylic poems and philosophy on concrete walls and canvas and refrigerator doors.”
Together they see Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy, walking in late to the balcony and moving in front of the projectionist. “His dreads are projected in silhouette onto the screen, obscuring Robert DeNiro and Jerry Lewis / The crowd is very confused then very amused / The King of Comedy crowned.”
Powerful Images Synchronized
Guenveur-Smith punches up events and people in ironic synchronicity with Basquiat’s life. In 1960, the only survivor of a plane crash, a young “white boy burned black” who had fallen from the plane, remarks that the city “looked like a magic fairyland.” Then he dies in the same Brooklyn hospital where three days later Basquiat is born. Hit by a car, Basquiat as a child loses his spleen the same year Andy Warhol, shot by radical feminist Valarie Solanas, loses his. Basquiat’s father came to Brooklyn in 1955, the same year Emmett Till was savagely murdered, the same year the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series on the backs of Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella.
The synced parallels continue throughout as touchstones centering Basquiat in time and out of time in this memorial. Black musicians, some of whom they listened to as Hollywatts rapped and Basquiat threw down on whatever medium he liked, are referenced: Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lady Day, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and many more. Guenveur-Smith makes sure to indicate that the best of them had stints in mental institutions or rehab centers. It’s the landscape of white American culture’s deadliness that Guenveur-Smith’s father referenced.
Guenveur-Smith Intersects Basquiat with Other Black Artists
As Guenveur-Smith threads together stories of Black artists and activists, he intersects them with Basquiat. Basquiat’s father said he “never needed a mic to politicize or a machete, but still he was a soldier.”
This is especially so in Basquiat’s Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). Guenveur-Smith starkly describes the murder of Michael Stewart by MTA police in searing detail. It’s a lynching that brought no accountability to the officers. Recognizing that Stewart, the graffiti artist and model, could “have been him,” Basquiat gives homage to Stewart in his acrylic marker-on-wood painting. After Guenveur-Smith’s jarring description, he revisits memories that inspired his own character “Smiley” in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing.
Guenveur-Smith concludes his memorial in a celebration of Basquiat’s legacy forever tied with a nation that reverences his astonishing work with apprehension and joy.
In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat is at New York Theatre Workshop.
