![]() book fair made wonderful appearances at where he was very warmly received. We thought that he was on his ascendance: he’d published his autobiography, done a great interview with Patt Morrison at the L.A. And this is something with which Rodney King lived for 20-some-odd years. I always try to speak to the present moment. Yeah, but you know what? It’s not an exercise in nostalgia. So here we are in 2013 and you’re trying to revisit this. ![]() And Holliday goes up to him and says, “I don’t know if you know who I am.” King says, “Yeah, I do, you’re the guy who saved my life.” But that’s an L.A. He ran into George Holliday at a filling station one night. was a flag guy on the site, and they had kicked it for a minute and had a great conversation. He reveals it in his autobiography, that he and Denny had met at a construction site one night, and Denny had dropped off a load of gravel. Oh, that’s mind-blowing, that he actually knew Reginald Denny. In the show you connect these dots about King’s life, which were kind of hiding in plain sight - the connection with Reginald Denny, for example. Sixty-five, that was the year that Rodney was born, that was the year that Watts blew up, that was the year that Simon Rodia died, that was the year that Juan Marichal hit John Roseboro upside the head with a baseball bat, that was the year that Bill Cosby won an Emmy for “I Spy,” the first Negro to win an Emmy. So ’65 and ’92 was a bookend of my childhood and young adulthood in L.A.: two riots, which I witnessed first-hand. And in a sense we predicted what was to happen on 4/29/92, a year before it happened. I had a big map behind me and I was pointing to all kinds of imagined conflagrations all over the city. I played the host and my partner from the Creole Mafia, Mark Broyard, played kind of a street-corner correspondent who was giving people proper cover-up techniques to deal with the LAPD. I was here in Los Angeles, and we immediately did a piece called “Kaos TV” at Ben Caldwell’s studio in Leimert Park, Kaos Network. Just a normal middle-age black man with a goatee and a receding hairline! It seemed to be appropriate that that was the only major abnormality in Rodney King. He speaks from his “abnormally enlarged heart,” which was revealed in the autopsy. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Timesīut he rejected reading a scripted speech when he went before the cameras while the riot was going on. He’s a man who’s drunk, he’s brain-damaged, he’s just had the most disappointing moment of his life: these cats who’ve beat him within an inch of his life are deemed not guilty. He says, “I’m not a racist,” but he never gets to the word “racist.” He says, “I’m neutral.” He says, “I love everybody.” He says, “I love people of color.” And he meant to go on and say he loved white people, too, but he never got to that. Because in the speech he wants to say, “Let’s try to be the change that we imagine.” But he never gets to it. And if you listen closely to that speech, what’s not said or what’s mis-said, is just as important as what’s said. And in his great speech he says, “I’m not what they’re picking me out to be.” Not making me out to be, “I’m not what they’re picking me out to be.”Įxactly. And he was not what the police made him out to be, and he was not what we tried to make him out to be. He was a country guy, as it were, he loved fishing, he loved swimming, he eventually loved skiing and surfing. And, no, he was not of the ghetto, he was of Altadena. tha Police,” he was playing De La Soul, the most harmless hippie hip-hop that there was. It’s about the reclamation of language, working against cliche. “Smith restores to King what King himself was always trying to wrestle back from the media before his sad death. “Smith doesn’t so much set out to define King as demonstrate the way in which he was overwhelmed by other people’s definitions - verbally assaulted in as relentless a manner as he was physically attacked by the police on that fateful night of March 3, 1991,” McNulty writes. ![]() Charles McNulty, The Times’ theater critic, praised the show, calling Smith “the jazz master of the form, riffing as freely and confidently as Sonny Rollins on sax.” His latest solo endeavor, “Rodney King,” with an original sound design by Marc Anthony Thompson and lighting by Jose Lopez, is playing through Sunday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City as part of RADAR L.A., International Festival of Contemporary Theater. Newton, baseball brawling immortals Juan Marichal and John Roseboro and dozens of others, while probing the great American themes of identity, individuality, ethnicity, class and power. In various past one-man shows he has portrayed Huey P. Like Walt Whitman, Roger Guenveur Smith contains multitudes. ![]()
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