Giant sea bass census; the Great Drought and our water-dependent history; Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron Parsons Kimmel; No Mad Scientists in "I Origins"
LA's storytelling renaissance: 11 local shows contributing to a new golden age
A while ago I did a piece for Off Ramp about the storytelling venues around town and the enthusiasm I felt about the burgeoning storytelling community. Since then my enthusiasm has been rewarded with a plethora of new storytelling programs on radio shows, podcasts, and a number of stages around town.
You're welcome.
When I first put up my own show, "Dylan Brody’s Thinking Allowed" at The Improv seven years ago, it was a hard sell, convincing a comedy club that storytelling could work for audiences accustomed to the four-laughs-per-minute ratio demanded of stand-up comics for TV. But now there are also regular storytelling events at the Comedy Store, The Laugh Factory, IO West, and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre — whose show Assssscat melds improvisational storytelling and structured, spontaneous sketch work.
(Note: Some of the language in the videos might be language you'd find in comedy clubs and storytelling venues.)
WATCH: Upright Citizens Brigade's ASSSSCAT
One of the most gratifying developments is the extent to which Hollywood has embraced an art form that still struggles to find its way into the profit-making mainstream. Small shows open up in coffee houses, theaters and bars. Some of them are curated. Some of them have the loose, bring-what-you’ve-got feel of the New York open mic comedy nights I remember from the early 80s. Some showcase successful writers from TV and film finding their footing as spoken-word performers. Others include poets and spoken-word performers trying out new material.
If you want polished readings of honed works, I suggest Wendy Hammers’ always-sold-out "Tasty Words Show" or the free "Sit-n-Spin" that’s been running for years at the Comedy Central Stage down at the Hudson Theater. Here’s Annie Girard at "Sit-n-Spin":
WATCH: Annie Girard at Sit'n'Spin
If you want to see a potluck of performers at all the stages of development, come to Muse on 8th on a Saturday night to see Alex Stein’s "Literary Salon." It’s a low-pressure zone where I beta test new stories, but I mostly go just to hear whatever new piece Alex has prepared for the evening.
Plus, "Literary Salon" has vegan chili that you can enjoy even if you usually mock vegans and the food they eat. Along the same spectrum, there’s Beverly Mickens’ "Story Salon" in an art gallery — where an aloof cat may rub against your legs as you watch the show and attack you if you try to pet him — and the "Pez Show" at the Actors Comedy Studio, where I saw Alyssa Vaughan do this bit.
WATCH: Alyssa Vaughan at the PEZ show
When I started in comedy at the start of the boom, I saw hundreds of comics just finding their voices as they moved toward stardom. The storytelling scene has that feel now.
This is a golden age. The rules aren’t set yet. Yes, storytelling has started to reach public radio with "Unfictional," "The Moth", and "Snap Judgment." But it hasn’t been ruined yet by money. There are no executives dictating the structure, the length or the content of the stories.
Come out into the night. See what happens as performers reach into the gaping wounds of their memories and draw out glistening gems to hold up in the light. Sometimes it’s magical, but it’s always visceral and human.
Here are some of the venues Dylan mentions, and some he doesn't:
- Sit n Spin
- The Moth (LA)
- Tasty Words
- Literary Salon at Muse on 8th
- Story Salon at the Art Parlor
- PEZ The Personal Essay Show at Actors Comedy Studio
- Don’t Tell My Mother embarrassing stories at Fais Dodo
- Asssscat at UCB Theater
- I Love a Good Story (show and podcast)
Podcasts:
Dylan Brody is a commenter for Off-Ramp. Are there any shows he missed? Let us know in the comments!
KPCC's Mike Roe breaks his pedometer at San Diego Comic Con
KPCC pop culture bogger Mike Roe is at Comic Con, one of 125,000 people who have descended on San Diego for the annual convention, and boy are his feet sore. In the first night, he says he logged 10,000 steps on his pedometer.
Comic Con is not just about comic books anymore, but about everything remotely connected with them, like video games, movies, TV shows, music groups, and products. And people in the industry use it to promote new stuff. Mike says sometimes they succeed - like with the new Godzilla movie - and sometimes they don't, like with the Tron reboot.
RELATED: Comic Con too big for you? Try Frank & Son in the City of Industry.
In our conversation Friday morning, Mike talked about seeing Kiefer Sutherland tell a great story about how he stopped what he thought was a mugging ...
WATCH Kiefer Sutherland tell the infamous story
... and about how you don't even have to go to Comic Con itself to enjoy the fun in San Diego.
Filmmaker Mike Cahill on scientists and filmmakers: Different tools, similar pursuit
Filmmaker Mike Cahill's new movie “I Origins” won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in January. The film explores the relationship of two scientists probing the question of reincarnation.
Cahill grew up in a family of scientists, and his upbringing shaped not only the way he sees the world but also how he fictionalizes it in his features. His first film, “Another Earth,” also won the Sloan prize at Sundance in 2011. It tells the story of a parallel world.
J.P.L. astrophysicist Kevin Hand was a Sloan judge for Cahill’s most recent Sundance win.
Cahill and Hand sat down with KPCC's John Horn to discuss the film. Horn suggested that the two were involved in professions that take a different approaches to their subject: Art, he said, asks questions. Science answers them.
That didn't go over well.
"I think scientists and artists are doing the exact same thing," Cahill said. "They are the non-numbed ones of the world. They are asking 'Why are we here?', 'What is this all about?' and they're just using different tools to try and explore that, knowing that we're here for a short link of time in the grand scheme of the 13.7-billion-year old universe."
Hand agreed. He said most movies depict scientists as caricatures.
"That's one of my pet peeves," he said. "The classic of course being the mad scientist played by Christopher Lloyd in 'Back to the Future,’ … and then there's Dr. Strangelove. Nowadays you've got the guys on 'Big Bang Theory.' Those are all wonderful but that's such the caricature of what it means to be a scientist and how scientists behave. Fact of the matter is, scientists are pretty regular people. At the end of a day, we put our pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else."
You can catch 'I Origins' at L.A. theaters this weekend.
Santa Barbara's shrine to the humble frog
Tuesday, I went up to Santa Barbara to interview marine biologist and Off-Ramp commentator Milton Love about the giant sea bass census he's helping run. Then, he drove us up into the hills above the city to the Riviera Neighborhood, saying he wanted to show me one of his and his wife's favorite spots.
We stopped on Paterna Road and he showed us a wall covered with hundreds of frogs. Not live ones, but plush frogs, calendar frogs, ceramic frogs, wood frogs, metal frogs, thermometer frogs, mask frogs, photo frogs, painted frogs.
RELATED: Which frog was just named the California state amphibian?
In other words, frogs.
A frog wall in Santa Barbara? Who left the first frog? Why did they leave it? So many frogs, so many questions. As the story is told, in 1989 a plastic frog appeared on a residential wall on Paterna Road in the Riviera neighborhood of Santa Barbara. Passersby and neighbors added frogs to the wall. ... It is rumored that one frog with a secret compartment contains a note warning that anyone who removes a frog from the shrine and keeps it more than two days will face certain death. We have yet to find this frog, but maybe you’ll have better luck! -- Relish Santa Barbara's Joslyn Baker
WATCH: John Rabe's video of the Santa Barbara frog shrine
Needless to say, we didn't take a single frog, and we're still alive ... and wart-free.
To see the frog shrine for yourself, the exact spot for your GPS is N 34° 26.309 W 119° 41.962.
RELATED: Help Milton count giant sea bass!
Fish census starts Aug. 1. Has the giant sea bass made a comeback?
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Off-Ramp commentator and UCSB marine biologist Milton Love about the Giant Sea Bass Census, the first count of the highly endangered fish, and about how fish get their names in the first place.
The giant sea bass is a huge fish, and before it was fished almost to extinction, UC Santa Barbara marine biologist Milton Love says they probably dominated the kelp beds off Southern California. He says the giant sea bass "gets to about 7 feet long, at least 580 pounds. I have some friends who are working on Catalina right now who insist that they saw one that was bigger than 7 feet long, maybe even 9 feet long, which would be an 800-pound fish."
But giant sea bass, which are not related to the Chilean sea bass, have two big flaws: They're easy to catch, and they're delicious.
"Commercial fisherman hit them really hard in the 20s and 30s and 40s, and recreational anglers started hitting them hard, too," Love says. "And by about the 1970s, there was a handful of fish left, and the Fish and Game Department imposed draconian laws" banning almost all taking of giant sea bass.
(L-R: UCSB's Doug McCauley and Milton Love. Image: Sonia Fernandez)
Now, Love says they might be making a comeback, so he and fellow UCSB researcher Douglas McCauley are organizing the first Giant Sea Bass Census, which runs Aug. 1 to 7. Essentially, if you're in the water that week, they're asking you to report back to them via their Facebook page. Report if you see any giant sea bass (and if so, how many), and report if you don't see any, because that's important, too.
Ecstatic diver meets 2 giant sea bass on first Channel Islands dive
"The question is," Love says, "how much are they coming back? Are there a hundred off the coast here? Are there a thousand? Are there 3,000? That makes a big difference because already, there are folks who are saying, 'The sea bass are back; we should be allowed to catch them.' There are people who are pushing for a some kind of quota. That may be fine (or) it may be a stupid idea, but you gotta have some idea of how many fish there are before you make that decision."
Love and I talked at length about the sea bass census, and then chatted about how fish get their names. Love himself named a fish parasite after a girlfriend long ago. Listen to our interview to find out more.
Dark Arts: Artist, occultist Marjorie Cameron featured in new book, MOCA show
UPDATE: The Cameron show at MOCA - Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman- opens Saturday, Oct. 11. Here's the dish from MOCA:
"Organized by guest curator Yael Lipschutz, the exhibition will be the largest survey of Cameron’s work since 1989 and will include approximately 91 artworks and ephemeral artifacts." -- MOCA blog
During a life that ended in 1995, Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron Parsons Kimmel was an occultist, an artist, an actress and wife to one of the world’s first rocket scientists. Neighbors and local newscasters called her a witch.
Cameron wasn’t really a witch. She was born normally enough — 1922 in Belle Plaine, Iowa. But from the very beginning, her art provoked.
“The first drawing that she did in school was somewhat obscene and she got in trouble for it,” says Scott Hobbs, who was a friend of Cameron and helped start the Cameron-Parsons Foundation in order to preserve and promote Cameron’s work.
Video: Marjorie Cameron performance
Cameron kept drawing after school. In the '40s she joined the U.S. Navy, where she drew maps for admirals and worked in a photographic unit during World War II.
After the war, Cameron moved to Pasadena where she found work as a fashion illustrator for newspapers. While she was living in Pasadena, she met Jack Parsons. The co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a renowned occultist, Parsons lived in a towering craftsman on Orange Grove that had become infamous for late night revelries.
The two stayed married until Parsons' death in an explosion in his garage in 1952. In that time, Cameron’s husband Jack influenced her art with the teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley, mythology and magic rituals.
Cameron’s art continued to stimulate. A reproduction of her erotic “Peyote Vision” drawing — not much larger than a matchbook — showed in L.A.’s famous Ferus gallery in the '50s. There, it also became a target for L.A.’s vice cops.
“It was considered obscene and the L.A. police raided the gallery more than once,” Hobbs says. “As result of that Cameron vowed to never show in a gallery again. And she pretty well kept to that.”
But Cameron wasn’t only anti-commercial with her art, she was also destructive with it. “At one point in the early 50s she destroyed all of her work,” says Hobbs. “She burned it. Some of it survived because she sold it to friends for little.”
Director Curtis Harrington’s video portrait of Cameron stands as the only visual record of many of the works she burned:
Cameron had a reputation as an enchantress — and an allure about her on screen that led to acting work too. She shows up alongside Dennis Hopper in the 1961 mermaid creature feature “Night Tide.” Cameron plays a mysterious sea-witch:
Cameron was more than just the real-life witch local TV stations would interview on Halloween, more than the woman who dressed in black and drove a hearse. Hobbs says we shouldn’t forget about Cameron the artist.
With the help of Hobbs and the Cameron-Parsons foundation, Yael Lipschutz is curating a show at MOCA that will focus on Cameron’s work.
“It’s an exciting opportunity for younger artists to see the output of someone who has a rather mythic underground status in the art world but whose objects and creations we haven’t had the opportunity to see in the flesh,” Lipschutz says.
There’s no denying Cameron was a prominent figure in the counterculture and beat movements here in L.A., influencing artists like George Herms and Wallace Berman with what Lipschutz calls a romantic, William Blake-like sensibility. Much of Cameron’s work remains obscure because of her own choices, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t always working on her art.
“She led a sort of renegade life,” Lipschutz says. According to Lipschutz, Cameron was known to escape to the desert, where she led a primal lifestyle and was handy with a shotgun. “No matter how poor her existence was, she never stopped creating,” Lipschutz says. “...It was always the fire that I think fueled her, more than anything.”
As a caretaker and promoter of Cameron’s work, Scott Hobbs agrees that, while Cameron’s fantastic life story might first get your attention, her art will keep you under its spell.
“Her work really does stand on its own,” Hobbs says. “I don’t meet people quite like that anymore.”
There’s a new book out called “Songs for the Witch Woman” that features Cameron’s drawings and Jack Parsons' poetry.
Cameron's upcoming MOCA show runs October 11 through next January.
So my son wears a dress; What's it to you?
Actor and writer Seth Menachem turns Off-Ramp commentator to tell us a story about his 2-year old son's preference for girl's clothing.
Most days, my 2-year old son Asher is dressed like Sofia the First, or some Disney princess, or is rocking a multi-colored Ralph Lauren spaghetti strap sundress. On a summer day in L.A., a dress is probably the most practical choice. And frankly, he looks good.
Every morning, my 4-year old daughter, Sydney, drags a chair into her closet and plucks a dress off of the rack. I try to lean her in other directions — “Why don’t we try shorts today?” — but Sydney’s stubborn. And I think she deserves the freedom to choose what she wants to wear.
RELATED: Off-Ramp's interview with Zoey Tur, the former Bob Tur, macho chopper pilot
I usually grab shorts and a T-shirt for Asher because he still has trouble dressing himself. But he has figured out how to undress himself, and pretty often that means he’s ripping off his clothing and screaming “dress” over and over again. He climbs onto the chair in the closet and tugs at one of Sydney’s dresses — “This one.”
(2-year old Asher Menachem. Image courtesy Seth Menachem)
It used to embarrass me when he wore a dress in public. And it wasn’t because I cared about people who thought it was weird that my son was wearing a dress. It was because I cared that they thought I had chosen to put him in a dress. As if there was an agenda on my part to use my son as a way to break societal norms, or as my friend’s mom — a religious Sephardic Jew — said to me, “You wanted another daughter?”
WATCH: Seth was on a conservative talk radio show this week to talk about his commentary
This was at a birthday party for my friend’s daughter and before I left my house I had tried to convince Asher to change into “boy clothes.” I knew that if he showed up in a dress, it would be an endless series of judgments, and I just didn’t feel like dealing with it.
But Asher was stronger than ever that morning. He had a huge tantrum as I tried to force his legs into a pair of shorts. His nose was running into his mouth as he cried and protested and I suddenly realized I was fighting for something I didn’t even believe in. I was making my kid feel badly for something he shouldn’t be ashamed of. And I stopped. And I gave him a hug and I apologized. And then I put back on the purple princess dress with his sister’s sparkly Tom’s shoes.
VIDEO: Seth as a singing businessman in the VW a-ha TV ad
RELATED: Seth as a singing businessman in the VW a-ha TV ad
We went to the party, and, as I figured, some of the Israelis laughed and made comments. One said to me, “Do you think this is funny? There are kids here. You want them to see this?” Another said, “You want him to be gay?”
I stayed calm. And I explained to them the best I could that there is no correlation between kids cross-dressing and being gay. And if he is gay, it’s not because of anything I did. It’s because he’s gay. And maybe it’s a stage. And maybe it’s not. But either way, I don’t want him to ever feel like he wasn’t able to express himself because his parents didn’t support him. And some understood. And some, trapped by religion or ignorance, gave us the stank face.
RELATED: Seth Menachem on Huff Post Live talking about Asher
Plenty of people are supportive. They’ll see my kids — Sydney with her long dirty blonde hair, and Asher with his short dark hair — and say, “I love your daughter’s pixie cut.” When I tell them he’s my son, they smile and say, “I love it.” They also apologize for confusing his gender, but I tell them, “Don’t apologize. He’s in a purple dress with sparkly shoes. How would you know?”
A gay friend saw me with the kids at Jazz at LACMA one Friday night, and said, “Just so you know I didn’t wear any dresses when I was younger,” which is essentially saying, “Don’t worry. Your kid’s not gay like me.” This openly gay, married man was trying to make me feel better about a problem that didn’t exist. If my son is gay, so be it. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s not. Maybe he’ll be a cross-dresser. Maybe not. I have no control over any of it. All I can do is be supportive.
The saddest thing about the exchange was learning how my friend felt about being gay, as if it were a curse, and not the awesome, endless dude party it really is. Then again, he’s married now. He probably forgot.
RELATED: Matt Duron, OC cop, 'man's man,' and his son wears dresses, too
I get home before my wife most nights, so I was taking the kids out to walk our dog. They were dressing up in different outfits, my daughter treating Asher like her doll, as she tried various dresses, shoes and headbands on him. And then Sydney told me she wanted me to wear a dress, too — “Oh my God, it will be so funny.”
I said, “No,” but she kept begging. I said, “People will laugh at me.” She said, “If they do, I’ll tell them to go away.” And I couldn’t argue with that, as I squeezed myself into Carrie’s most flexible dress. We walked the dog on our block, and the pleasure my kids took in seeing their dad go out of his comfort zone trumped the humiliation I felt.
Carrie pulled up to the house, and I saw her slacked jaw from the end of the street. She laughed. She took a picture. And she told me I better not rip her dress. And then we all went for a pizza.
This commentary originally appeared on xojane.com.
Spike Lee Retrospective: 'As an artist you want to have longevity'
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is in the midst of a Spike Lee retrospective, showcasing rare and recent films from one of America's most controversial and outspoken directors. Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene has this profile of Spike Lee, and four films that broke him through the studios' unofficial color line almost 30 years ago.
Pop culture historian Nelson George once called Spike Lee the Jackie Robinson of African-American cinema. But don't tell Spike that.
"We had Oscar Micheaux, Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles," Lee said. " When you're talking about Jackie Robinson, that means the first. I was not the first."
As a working filmmaker, Lee seems to think being placed on an edifice is the same as being put on the shelf. But younger black filmmakers? They carve Spike Lee onto their personal Rushmores, every time.
RELATED: Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" turns 25
John Singleton is the writer/director of "Boyz n the Hood" and eight other feature films.
"You know, he's a hero to me," says Singleton. "He was the first African-American filmmaker to just say whatever the hell he wanted to say. From a black man's perspective, (to) make an honest discourse about whatever subject he wanted to make. "
Lee won't pick his favorite Spike Lee film, but that's a hard task for anybody if they're sympathetic to Lee's cinematic approach.
"When people come up to me and tell me what their favorite film is," Lee says, "there's a lot of films. People say 'She's Gotta Have It,' ton of people say 'School Daze.'
VIDEO: "Good and Bad Hair" from "School Daze"
My white fans, they loooovve '25th Hour.' People love 'Crooklyn' — a whole lot of people say 'Crooklyn.' So it varies. "
There have been failures too. Lee's remake of Park Chan-wook's cult classic "Oldboy" was among 2013's splashier critical and box office flops. Still, no major American filmmaker of Lee's generation has a more personal body of work, and none has broken more new ground.
Lee's a brand name, a pop icon, a human turning point in American social and cultural history. And though he's not ready to be treated like a monument, you get the feeling Lee was playing to history all along.
"It's not a good thing when you get put into this whole flavor of the month thing," Lee says. "It's not good to be a flash in the pan. As an artist you want to have longevity, because longevity will let you do your work. And artists want to build up a body of work."
Since 1986, Spike Lee has made nearly two dozen theatrical feature films, plus commercials, music videos, and documentaries too numerous to count.
The Academy series By Any Means Necessary: A Spike Lee Joints Retrospective continues through July with screenings both at LACMA's Bing Theatre and The Motion Picture Academy.
Complex edifices: An update on Hauser Wirth & Schimmel and Broad Museum
Off-Ramp host John Rabe gets an update from arts reporter Jori Finkel on the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery coming to the downtown Arts District and the Broad Museum coming to Grand Avenue.
One's gritty; one's grand. Two new important arts spaces are coming to downtown L.A. soon, one in the Arts District that's long been the home of poor artists, another alongside Grand Avenue's grand edifices. Jori Finkel, an arts journalist currently freelancing for the New York Times, gave us an update on both this week.
First, we went to 901 East 3rd Street, the site of a former flour mill. It's near the former Al's bar, a punk rock Mecca, and across the street from Wurstküche, the sausage and beer hall.
RELATED: Documentary "Young Turks" covers an era when the Arts District was really gritty
The international art gallery owners Hauser & Wirth will be opening a huge new gallery here in partnership with former MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel. Finkel says, "A powerhouse gallery, for sure. Galleries in Zurich, New York, and London."
It will be called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. "[Schimmel] is actually a partner with them worldwide now," she says, "but this particular gallery he will be running, and we can already see his stamp on the program, because the first thing they'll be doing — maybe January of 2015 — is a pop-up gallery show to show the world what they're bringing to L.A., and it's going to be a big one." Finkel says that show will include Mark Bradford, Laura Owens, Sterling Ruby and Mary Weatherford as among the artists.
READ: Hauser & Wirth's news release on the new gallery
Then, it'll close again and — after extensive renovations — reopen sometime in 2016 as a "gallery on the model of a museum," as Finkel puts it. "It is commercial, but they're staffing up as though it were a museum," with educational programming and some exhibits at which the art will not be for sale, she says.
Schimmel left MOCA because he didn't get along with Jeffrey Deitch, the former high-end gallery owner brought in to direct the museum. He's since been replaced by Philippe Vergne. The question asked then, with raised eyebrows, was, "What does a gallery owner know about running a museum?"
Now, it's only fair to ask, "Does Schimmel, who has spent decades in the museum world, have what it takes to run a gallery? "
Finkel responds: "'Does he have what it takes to make sales?' is a question I've heard other (art) dealers ask."
And despite the fact that he's built deep relationships with important artists, "Paul is not known for working on the service model so much. He has a big personality. People love him for that reason, and he rubs some people the wrong way for that reason."
Next, it was off to Grand Avenue to check out the progress on Eli Broad's new edifice, the Broad Museum, completion of which has been delayed until at least the middle of next year, according to what Broad told Finkel.
PHOTOS: KPCC's hardhat tour of the Broad Museum, under construction
Finkel says the works inside will be the contemporary art collected by Broad and his wife Edythe and by the Broad Art Foundation. "So while you'll find some early Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol-type works, you're also going to find some really big names of contemporary art today: Murakami, Koons, Cindy Sherman."
Will the Broad hurt MOCA, which is almost across the street? Finkel says she doesn't think so, because MOCA has struggled with low attendance, and "anything else that brings people who are art-interested or even just art-curious to this area will make this more of a destination for art. How much more is the question."
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What the Natural History Museum's Becoming LA exhibit can teach us about drought
A year ago last month, Los Angeles's Natural History Museum opened its Becoming LA exhibit -- an illustrated, interactive story of how Los Angeles became the world class city it is today. None of which could have happened without some of the most impressive water engineering projects in American history.
And now that drought and water is the minds of nearly every Angeleno, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson asked Karen Wise, Vice President of Exhibits of Education at the museum: what can LA's history with water teach us today?
If you want to watch first hand evidence of how the transformation of Los Angeles from desert to oasis was sold to the public,watch Los Angeles City of Destiny, a short film produced by Rodney Gilliam in 1949 for the Standard Oil company:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwzKW_6r_ng
The conversation at NHM continues: there's an art exhibit with work by painter Rob Reynolds called Just Add Water, and a series of great discussions under the same name.
One man 'Rodney King' show returns to LA
Rodney King became part of Los Angeles lore, starting one March night in 1991 when his beating by police officers was videotaped by an amateur photographer.
A one-man show about Rodney King returns to Los Angeles at the end of the month, after performances in New York, Amsterdam, and most recently, in our nation's capital. It's written and performed by a man whose obsession with King began at the end of King's story, after King was found dead in his Rialto swimming pool.
VIDEO: The full Rodney King beating video
Roger Guenveur Smith never met Rodney King. He says he opened his laptop on Father's Day two years ago and read about King's death. "I was quite moved," he says, "and I wanted to know why." Within five weeks, Smith was onstage, trying to figure it out in front of an audience.
Using interviews, YouTube videos, and the autobiography "Rodney King, the Riot Within," Smith created his one-man show "Rodney King." The piece is different every night – Smith compares it to jazz – but begins with an in-your-face rap song by Willie D and the Ghetto Boys from 1992 entitled "F- Rodney King." Smith says Willie D was "very articulate about why Rodney King was not worthy of our sympathy" — not for the reasons you might think, either. Willie D accused King of being a sellout and an Uncle Tom.
RELATED: One of Rodney King's last interviews
It's not the first time Smith has taken on real-life events to create an evening of theatre. His "Juan and John" told the tale of the infamous baseball game where Giants pitcher Juan Marichal went after Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro with a bat. Smith says he was just a kid in L.A. when it happened, but he remembered burning his Marichal baseball card, repeating the chant of the Watts riots just a week earlier, "Burn, baby, burn."
In his piece about Rodney King, Smith uses a give and take, teasing out of King pieces of his life. He reminds King about that particular night in 1991, "the basketball game was on and you were hitting that Old English 800 Malt Liquor – 40 oz times 40 times 40 and you were never that good at math, right?"
The play ends with the impassioned, impromptu speech delivered by Rodney King as the city of Los Angeles went up in flames: "Can we all get along?"
But Smith performs the entire plea – what he calls "one of the great American speeches" delivered by a man who never even finished high school. "He had learning disabilities, but he spoke under great duress, probably under some alcoholic influence, but he spoke from the heart and he spoke without a script even though he was given a four page speech by his attorneys."
In that rambling speech, a nearly sobbing Rodney King says he "could understand the first upset for the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on and to see the security guard shot on the ground. It's just not right. It's just not right. Because those people will never go again to their families again."
Smith says King stopped a riot.
But King's story of redemption is cut short with his death at the bottom of a swimming pool at the age of 47. The tragedy, Smith says, is that "we thought that he was on his way back, that he had recovered from his wounds, those inflicted by the LAPD and those inflicted by himself."
Smith says younger audiences only know Rodney King from his appearance on "Celebrity Rehab." Smith says it's not surprising that it works as well in Amsterdam as it does in Los Angeles. "I would like to think that Hamlet plays outside of Denmark." Smith says Rodney King's life and untimely demise "are the stuff of which tragedy has consistently and traditionally been made."
"Rodney King" returns to Los Angeles July 24-26 at 8pm at Grand Performances in downtown L.A. The shows are free.