In 1968, a seven-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street in Brooklyn. He had to get his spleen removed. The same year in Manhattan, a 39-year-old Andy Warhol was famously shot by the artist Valerie Solanas. Warhol also had his spleen removed. The two spleen-less artists would later become fast friends.
This is just one of the many unusual—and 100% true—connections made by the actor Roger Guenveur Smith, a friend of Basquiat’s from the Los Angeles club scene, in his one-man-show In Honour of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Playing at New York Theatre Workshop, just around the block from Basquiat’s final studio at 57 Great Jones Street (rented to him by Warhol), Smith’s stories jump back and forth in time in a spoken-word ode to his late friend. While working in the tradition of the improvisational styles of jazz, blues and hip-hop, Smith poetically weaves happenstance into destiny.
In the show, Smith describes Basquiat’s life as “inaugurated and extinguished in a crucible of flame”. A few days before the artist was born on 22 December 1960, two commercial airplanes collided in mid-air over Staten Island. One of them crashed in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Park Slope. The sole survivor was an 11-year-old boy, thrown from the plane into a snowbank.
“The Park Slope Church called the Pillar of Fire didn’t survive the crash,” Smith says towards the beginning of his hour-long soliloquy. “And neither did the funeral parlour next door. And neither did the white boy burned black. He expired the next day.” The “crucible of flame” at the end of Basquiat’s short life at age 27, on 12 August 1988, came in the form of a fire at the Empire State Building the same day. Basquiat is buried at Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, also the site of a memorial to the 134 victims of the 1960 plane crash.
In Honour of Jean-Michel Basquiat is a fairly minimalist production. Smith, who both wrote and stars in the show, stands behind a microphone the whole time. Clad in a suit with bare feet—à la Basquiat—Smith recounts how he met the artist in the 1980s, how they became friends and collaborators, how Basquiat once grabbed a Confederate-flag jacket off someone’s back at a club and stomped it while laughing and how, after the artist’s death, Basquiat inspired Smith’s portrayal of the character Smiley in Spike Lee’s groundbreaking 1989 film Do the Right Thing. In one of Smith’s improvised sections, he performs a prolonged recitation of Smiley’s lines from the movie.
Smith and Lee have worked together on many projects over the years, including film adaptations of two of Smith’s other one-man shows—about the Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton and about Rodney King, a Black man brutally beaten by police in Los Angeles in 1992. On stage, Smith makes particular note of how deeply affected both Lee and Basquiat were by the death of the Black street artist Michael Stewart at the hands of New York City police in 1983. “‘That could have been me,’ says JMB, fastforwarding a flick as yet unreleased,” Smith says in the show. “Rewinding a painting called The Death of Michael Stewart.”
Roger Guenveur Smith and Marc Anthony Thompson in In Honour of Jean-Michel Basquiat at New York Theatre Workshop Photo: Marcus Middleton, courtesy New York Theatre Workshop
For a performance dedicated to a visual artist, In Honour of Jean-Michel Basquiat has very little by way of visual stimulus. While Smith incorporates stories about several of Basquiat’s works—Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) (1983), the eerily prescient inclusion of the word “twenty-seven” in The Pilgrimage (1982) and depiction of Green-Wood Cemetery in Bird on Money (1981), the 1982 skull painting that famously sold for $110.5m at Sotheby's in 2017—the writer-performer’s understated outfit is the only reference to Basquiat’s visual aesthetic. But where the visual is muted, the auditory shines through.
Perhaps the most enticing part of the show is the work of the second man on stage: the musician Marc Anthony Thompson, Smith’s collaborator of more than 30 years, who provides live (and often improvised) sound design. Seated in the corner behind a keyboard and surrounded by audio equipment, Thompson provides the all-important sonic component to accompany the stories of a visual artist who loved and made music. Basquiat even had an experimental punk band called Gray—named after Gray’s Anatomy, a book his mother gave him while he was recovering from his splenectomy.
While Smith’s words intertwine the names and stories of musical legends like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, Nat King Cole, Count Basie and Billie Holiday, Thompson provides snippets of their songs and creates a musical atmosphere that Basquiat himself would have approved. But the live sound in the show is more than just clips of preexisting tunes; it is a soundtrack that zigs and zags like a jazz solo, often incorporating audio to great emotional effect.
When Smith recalls meeting Basquiat in his studio in Venice Beach, for example, Thompson’s contribution brings the audience into the scene by way of a saxophone layered with the unmistakable sounds of spray paint. “We're here, and he's stomping on canvas,” Smith says. “His Air Jordans are grounded, while Charlie Parker (‘Bird’) flies high on the boombox—riff after riff after riff, Eartha Kitt after riff.”
With these auditory clues, the audience is left to imagine what the resulting work of art might have looked like. (If they did not already know, that is.) And therein lies the true art of In Honour of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The artist’s creative genius shines through not via visual markers of his work, but through a syncopated remixing of true stories from his life and a soundscape that inspired him.
- In Honour of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York Theatre Workshop, until 10 October