When Spike Lee’s filmed version of Roger Guenveur Smith’s “A Huey P. Newton Story” was broadcast on Public Television last month, a wider audience finally got to see a remarkable performance work developed in 1999 at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Smith has done his share of movies and TV–he shows up in “Eve’s Bayou,” “Do the Right Thing” and as Laertes opposite Campbell Scott’s “Hamlet”–but his real gifts lie within his signature blend of live poetry and performance art, alternating between historicity and emotional fiction.
Smith is back at the MCA–this weekend only–developing a complex and oblique, but staggeringly expressive, solo work called “Iceland.” Co-commissioned by the Walker in Minneapolis (where it was seen last fall) and the MCA, “Iceland” is billed as a work in progress. It still needs work–most notably in the mundane but necessary area of narrative clarity–but “Iceland” already is a thrilling and wholly elegant piece of writing by an author-performer with palpable, singular gifts for the provocative juxtaposition of words and imagery.
The show is performed with great attention to form and rhythm. Remarkably, a good portion of it is in rhyming couplets. Yet none of the language ever feels forced. A narrative summary is problematic because the work is hard–currently too hard–to follow cold. At the start of the 70-minute monologue, Smith declares the show to be about love in Brooklyn, and therefore “nothing special.” And indeed, as the narrative flows onward, Smith’s central alter ego tells of the perils of commitment–especially for artists–and the apocalyptic responsibilities of childhood.
Yet we don’t stay in Brooklyn, but voyage instead to Iceland and the tropics as Smith morphs from character to character (many of whom need clearer introduction), musing on exile, both the personal and political variety. As was the case with “Huey”–which, like “Iceland” is a collaboration between Smith and the talented, understated composer Marc Anthony Thompson (a.k.a. Chocolate Genius)–Smith demonstrates his uncanny facility at connecting language of a widely disparate nature to form striking, provocative images. He can link Jules Verne with calamari, and Africans with Heinekens. He describes–then perfectly impersonates–a security guard with a seemingly oxymoronic Nordic-Jamaican accent. And he talks of working on a self-portrait that won’t bite back.
Lithe, fluid and eloquent, the brilliantly talented Smith misses barely a note all night. But for all his manipulations of historical biography, one senses he’s most comfortable talking of the agony of love in Brooklyn. It feels like he never really wants to leave for Iceland. And given the way he describes passion in that borough, neither do we.
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“Iceland” runs through Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Phone 312-397-4010.
