![]() ![]() "I don't even know if I'm awake sometimes or in a dream state," the actor says at one moment in a high-pitched nasal whine that is an uncanny approximation of Newton's own constricted speech. He is a highly conflicted man, a people's hero in spite of himself, a doomed intellectual acutely conscious of the ironies of his violent life. Smith shows us Newton in the grip of a stultifying aimlessness, shut up in a penthouse apartment in Oakland overlooking the jail where he served time for killing a policeman. Those whose primary image of Newton is a celebrated '60s poster - which depicted him as a young firebrand, seated on a rattan throne, dressed in black leather jacket and beret, and brandishing a spear in one hand and a bolt-action shotgun in the other - are in for a jolt. ![]() (It begins a three-week run Friday at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre.) The work was unveiled a year ago at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, and Smith has been performing it around the country ever since. Newton Story," a one-man show that the actor pieced together out of Newton's assorted writings, speeches and interviews. Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party and a 1960s icon, toward the end of his life, when the party had long since been destroyed by the FBI. They jiggle and twitch in an involuntary dance that betrays either an abundance of energy or a case of shot nerves. And even though he is seated, his legs can't keep still. Alone on a stage, with only demons to hide behind, Roger Guenveur Smith has a truly hallucinatory presence.Ĭigarette smoke curls around his handsome head like the tendrils of a poisonous plant.
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