Smith serves Newton much better when he focuses on his activist passion and his well-worn humor.
It’s not just an unappealing swerve for a production built on fire and echoes of indignities past, but one that needs to abruptly cross five lanes of traffic to get to the place Smith wants it to finish. It also lands in the final minutes with an awkward sentimentality and self-pitying moroseness. There are some flaws in the version of the work that Smith crafted for the film version, most notably an occasional tendency to intellectually wander and ramble that is an unkind indicator of the work’s improvisational origins. He engages in enough emotional loop-de-loops throughout the course of the piece that it becomes as exhausting as an acting endeavor can be when the performer is barely required to leave the chair. It’s an impressive acting performance from Smith, who nicely captures Newton’s pinched, nasally voice and the restless, rapid-fire tempo of his philosophizing. Though there are occasional suggestions that Newton is on one side of some sort of interview, it’s largely presented as a stream-of-consciousness verbal flow from the man, which encompasses everything from his personal history to the details of the Panthers’ Ten Point Program to his thoughts on rap music. The audience surrounds him, sitting in two tiers designed to resemble the inside of a prison. The staging of the piece puts Smith as Newton on a lone chair in the middle of a metal platform with nothing more than a microphone, a pack of cigarettes and a few scraps of notebook paper in his pocket. For the film version, which would stand as the definitive version of the production after all others took up residence only in fading, faulty memories, Smith opted for a 90-minute monologue, honing a shooting script to be performed for Lee’s cameras at the Angel Orensanz Cultural Arts Center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. On stage, it was a fairly loose performance, stretching in whatever ways Smith and Thompson choose to take it. Newton and responding to questions asked by sound designer Marc Anthony Thompson (who is better known in some circles as the creative force behind the eloquent soul music collective known as Chocolate Genius). The work developed into a dialogue with Smith playing Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton Story over several years, including a handful of “in progress” and workshop performances before it had its official world premiere at San Francisco’s Magic Theater in the fall of 1995. This was a natural side project for him to take on. What’s more, Lee had established a newly modified career track that found him alternating between the fiction films for which he was best known and documents of stage performances, having filmed John Leguizamo’s Freak and the concert film The Original Kings of Comedy. Lee had also made it quite clear by this point that he was the only director suited to projects about the more militant voices in the Civil Rights movement, having raged against the notion that someone like Norman Jewison might be qualified to bring Malcolm X’s life story to the screen. and Malcolm X to the wall of Sal’s flaming pizzeria. Smith had appeared in no less than six of Spike Lee’s films to this point, including the prominent role that involved tacking the photo of Martin Luther King Jr. Newton to film, there was clearly one man for the directing job. When Roger Guenveur Smith was given the opportunity to transfer his award-winning one-man stage play about Huey P.
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