The director shot the piece with more than a dozen cameras, often going close-in on the performer, sometimes trailing down his body to match a point Smith was making. “What Roger is doing, like Mark Twain and many of our best storytellers, is humanizing someone who’s been made into a demon, an animal, into less of a human being,” Lee explained. Newton.” another story about a black man inaccurately iconized. Lee and Smith have teamed up on some nine projects, including “Do the Right thing” and “Malcolm X.” In the mid-1990s they also worked on Smith’s one-man show “Huey P. Underscoring Smith’s point: King was known to his friends as Glen, his middle name his first name, Rodney, was simply what the police report had down - so that the King the world knew was quite literally not the man he actually was. But he was a spokesperson for nothing but his own agenda.” “They tried to give him courses in black history they wanted him to be a spokesperson. “Rodney King was not somebody who tried to be somebody he was not,” Smith said. “Rodney King” conveys the poignant tragedy of its subject’s story, but also the ways our understanding of that story has betrayed him. Using a kind of egg-on second person tone (“Right, Rodney?”) The performer is often filling in the details of King’s life, challenging and provoking him, but really, challenging and provoking the many assumptions we’ve made about him, his reduction into a symbol. In between, in segments he’s improvised and honed over the years - years in which King’s legacy loomed over high-profile incidents of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement - Smith explores the man himself. Smith starts with an invocation of the Geto Boys’ accusation of the subject as an Uncle Tom (“… Rodney King”)- unattributed to throw us off balance - and ends by recounting, in its entirety, the beautiful tentativeness of King’s landmark speech (“People, I just, I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along?”). The tone can go from confrontational to plaintive and back again. (“You wanna reminisce/it goes something like this/91, 92/Come on, Rodney King you know what to do/It was a Saturday night/Right?/And you were chilling at your boy’s crib watching the fight.”) Smith delivers the material sweatily, breathily, pulsatingly, with a musicality to his voice and a meter to his patter. It is also, it should be said, a provocation. Smith’s piece is a grounded depiction, rich in unexpected detail: the Bob Marley wig he donned to observe the riots incognito the father who alternately bonded with and beat him the fact that he actually knew Reginald Denny, the white truck driver nearly killed in the riots, from a moment they shared at a construction site. “We want to portray him as a human being - a man who loved to fish, a man who was listening to De La Soul when he was pulled over, a man who was a second-generation alcoholic drowning victim.” “We don’t want to make Rodney King a symbol of the oppressed black man,” Smith said. We want to portray him as a human being.” We don’t want to make Rodney King a symbol of the oppressed black man. But he also transcends all of those things. King does serve here as a kind of blank slate for our notions of victimhood, resistance and harmony. Riots.Īs television prepares to mark those dark days with sweeping historical pieces, “Rodney King” goes the other way: It asks, in ways journalistic and imagined, who the man at the center of it all really was. Spike Lee shot a performance in New York one recent summer, applying some Spike-ian directorial touches, and Netflix began streaming it Friday to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the L.A. Thanks to Netflix, though, “Rodney King” will live on - and be available to a much wider audience than the people that since 2012 have packed small theaters around the country to see it. (He gave it one final go-round at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theater, where he’d workshopped it years ago, in March.) After nearly five years of serious road time, he was just a few minutes away from taking the stage for the last-ever performance of his searing piece. Smith was speaking by phone from Portland, Ore.
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