![]() "I didn't dare step on that stage until I felt my archival work was done," he says. He spent nearly a year digging into Newton's life, allowing him to factually improvise in character. That's a trial Smith won-Newton garnered an Obie Award in 1996 as well as a Peabody five years later "for exploring events from our past in a provocative, challenging, and enlightening manner"-thanks in no small measure to his skills as a historian and researcher. Newton Story-based on the life of the late activist and Black Panther Party co-founder-"I had his widow, his brother, sister, and his chief of staff all in the audience, and I'm there 'being him.' That's trial by fire." On a stage in Oakland in 1995, performing A Huey P. "Every piece has its different challenge," Smith says. 22, 1965, clash at Candlestick Park when the San Francisco Giants' Juan Marichal took his bat to the head of the Los Angeles Dodgers' John Roseboro). Newton, as well as works on the Watts Towers, the Christopher Columbus saga-set in 1992 with the explorer as a lounge entertainer-and Juan and John, based on the notorious Aug. Smith has mounted one-man shows on Rodney King, Frederick Douglass, and Huey P. Yet the artist's stage work-controversial, transcendent, and wildly original, enhanced by compelling sound and visual design-is his hallmark. Last summer, he made a splash with a featured role as a Harvard-educated drug lord in the 2015 Sundance sensation Dope. Moviegoers know Smith as a character actor with a broad palette of small but memorable turns in such mainstream hits as American Gangster, Poetic Justice, and All About the Benjamins, and a fistful of films with director Spike Lee (including Lee's latest, Chi-Raq, which examines violence in inner-city Chicago and is scheduled for release by year's end). "I could walk into a room, and two people that I loved-who loved each other-were yelling and screaming at each other." "The thing that stuck with me was the emotional resonance," Smith says. I walked into the kitchen where my parents were arguing vociferously, and my Uncle Milton was there." Young Roger was upset, but his uncle reassured him: "Don't worry, your parents are simply rehearsing what's called a play"-namely, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Helen Guenveur and Sherman Smith were also responsible for their son's initial exposure to acting. My father had to explain to me that no, JFK was not a Negro." And I said, 'Well, is Kennedy a Negro?' My parents were adamantly in support of Kennedy, so I figured that he must be a Negro that was the form of support that was discussed. "I remember asking my dad if he was a Negro, and he said yes. "There were political conversations all the time at the dinner table," he says. It seems appropriate: Throughout a decades-long acting, writing, and directing career on stage and screen, Smith has confronted issues of racial identity, politics, and history through his interpretations of events and the lives of iconic figures-many of them African-American.īorn in Berkeley and raised in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles to a lawyer father and dentist mother, Smith's parents informed his social awareness at an early age. All of the surrounding characters are played with a lovely sense of realism, adding hints of texture to each scene but never too much personality.Family legend has it that Roger Guenveur Smith '77 was conceived at an NAACP gathering in Monterey. As always, Haley is great at this, igniting loathing from the audience with his first appearance. Hammer is solid as Sam, although his innate compassion leaves Haley to play the villain of the piece. Living amid such systemic degradation, exploitation and violence simply gnaws away at Nat, and Parker underplays him beautifully, letting the charisma surge quietly under the surface. Parker's script recounts Nat's life story with telling details, contrasting his engaging courtship with Cherry with the series of insults they suffer at every turn. And once Nat decides he can no longer support the immorality and injustice of the system, he has little choice but to lead a slave revolt. But Nat realises that he can't continue with this after his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King) is brutally attacked by the cruel slave tracker Cobb (Jackie Earle Haley). In fact, Nat is such a great preacher that Sam loans him to fellow slave owners to convey the Old Testament "slaves obey your owners" message. The two grew up together, so Sam is familiar with Nat's intelligence and passion, and also with the fact that Sam's mother (Penelope Ann Miller) encouraged Nat to read and study the Bible. It opens in 1809 Virginia, where the soft-spoken Nat (Parker) works as a slave for benevolent owner Sam (Armie Hammer).
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