Immediately following a free coordinated Netflix screening of his Bessie Award-winning solo performance RODNEY KING, Roger Guenveur Smith will engage in conversation with Sarah Bellamy, Artistic Director of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre, where the play was produced in 2015, and Rohan Preston, lead theatre critic of the Minneapolis StarTribune.
Bellamy, Preston, and Smith will discuss theatre as an essential public service, and its historic and contemporary response to civic crisis. Smith has a longstanding alliance with Twin Cities institutions which also includes the Guthrie Theatre, the Walker Arts Center, Macalester College, and the Eastside Freedom Library.
Mr. Smith will address the impetus and continued influence of what Mr. Preston describes as a “mesmerizing” tour-de-force, directed for the screen by Mr. Smith’s longtime colleague Spike Lee. Calling King “the first reality tv star,” Smith recounts his savage videotaped beating by four LAPD officers in 1991, the murderous fracture of Los Angeles after the officers were found not guilty of assault charges in 1992, and King’s tragic navigation of notoriety which ended in 2012, when he drowned in his backyard swimming pool.
In commemoration of Eric Garner, killed in custody of the NYPD in 2014, and in eerie premonition of George Floyd, killed in custody of the Minneapolis Police Department in 2020, Smith appends their final words to King’s “Can We All Get Along” speech:
“I Can’t Breathe.”
Complimentary viewing courtesy of Netflix
MEET THE PANELISTS
SARAH BELLAMY
Artistic Director for Penumbra Theatre Company, St. Paul Minnesota.
ROHAN PRESTON
Writer and critic Rohan Preston has covered performing arts in the Twin Cities for the Star Tribune since 1998.
ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH
Award winning actor, writer, and director.
