Review: Penumbra's 'Basquiat' channels painter whose piece fetched $110 million

Roger Guenveur Smith is spellbinding in the solo show he wrote and directed.

By Rohan Preston Star Tribune

October 18, 2024 — 10:00am

You may know nothing about Jean-Michel Basquiat or care little about the late painter, aside from the 2017 headline about one of his pieces selling for a whopping $110.5 million, the most for an American artist at public sale or, in Minnesota terms, enough to buy a lake or two.

But Roger Guenveur Smith wants you to know him better, and that means putting him in a cultural and cosmic context. In "In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat," the Obie-winning actor, writer and director puts on a storytelling master class.

Onstage at St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre, Smith stands like a mesmerizing monument. His feet hardly move as he gestures during the hourlong show. Yet Smith's words flow over the audience like some kind of spider silk, binding and holding us in thrall even as we remain hyperaware.

His performance makes us care about a figure born to a Nuyorican mother and Haitian American father in Brooklyn who expressed his brilliance frenetically before dying at age 27, the same ages as Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.

Best known to Minnesota audiences for his roles in Spike Lee films such as "Do the Right Thing," "Malcolm X" and "School Daze," Smith also has performed at Walker Art Center and Penumbra. In "Basquiat," he muses on his friendship with the artist, including their first meeting as two dance-loving young men at a Los Angeles nightclub — Smith the Ivy League rapper going by the name of Hollywatts and Basquiat the East Coast painter having fun on the dance floor.

"Basquiat" starts with the actor, who also wrote and directed the show, quoting his own father about his artistic dreams.

The show excavates the psychic, cosmic and cultural worlds that informed Basquiat's work. Smith recounts the bookends of the artist's life, like the 1960 collision of two airplanes in New York, with one crashing in Brooklyn's Park Slope and a boy burning but surviving long enough to speak a week before Basquiat was born in the same borough. The implication is that a spirit may have transferred from one body to the other.

There's also the time when, as a child, Basquiat was hit by a car that cost him his spleen the same year that Andy Warhol, who would become his mentor, was shot and also lost his spleen. And Basquiat's death in 1988 coincided with another skyward fire, this time of the Empire State Building.

Are these just coincidences or do they have deeper spiritual resonances? Smith's juxtapositions give his thoughts away. For "Basquiat" is personal and loving, and filled with emotion, even as the performer delivers on a mostly bare stage with a lit crown painted by artist Seitu Jones.

Some have likened Basquiat's prodigious output to jazz if the music erupted like paint onto canvas from the tough subway grilles of his native New York.

"Basquiat" nods to that soundscape. Smith teams with longtime collaborator Marc Anthony Thompson, whose sound design efficiently evokes the dance floor where Smith and Basquiat first meet with an excerpt of Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock." Thompson uses plinks and underscoring as well. These aural treatments, augmented by lighting designer Wu Chen Khoo's aurora borealis color palette, help to propel Smith's story.

In life, Basquiat the artist drew on encyclopedic influences, from music to literature, graffiti to Da Vinci. Through whispers and vocal tics, Smith draws us into the artist's spirit. We listen hard, as if to hear the secrets of a figure who remains ineffable, perhaps not fully knowable, even as we take in the startling lyricism of his channeled genius.