“When we read the diary, we have a sense of the claustrophobia, but when you go there, you really feel that eight people were living in this small space and had to be very quiet and you can’t flush the toilet or run water or raise your voice above a whisper or turn on the lights during the daytime,” Smith said. When he went to Amsterdam to perform it, the first place he visited there was the house where the Franks hid out with another family. He’d been thinking of doing a show on Frank, but when Rodney King died in 2012, he focused on creating a one-man performance about King. As the father of two daughters himself, as Frank was, Smith was also personally interested in the man. Smith calls Frank, who gave his daughter the diary she wrote in for her 13 th birthday, a “mysterious person,” and he wanted to know more about him. “With this I’m thinking about the weight of his psyche and driving that man’s energy down into that table and keeping the performance as still and quiet as possible.”Īs he has since 1992, when they made Christopher Columbus together, Smith is working with musician Mark Anthony Thompson, who does the live sound design for the piece. With Rodney King, I call it kind of a ‘Soul Train’ kabuki,” he said. With Huey Newton, even though I was sitting in a chair, I was never not in motion. “A lot of my work has been very physically executed.

He will sit at a desk with a microphone in front of him. “He was born in chaos,” Smith says about Frank.īut for the solo show Otto Frank, opening at the Magic Theatre on March 12, Smith wants to do something different than he’s done with previous subjects-stay still. Smith sees some connection between the subject of his latest show, Otto Frank, father of famous diarist Anne Frank, and King and Newton. Lee told the Los Angeles Times that Smith does what Mark Twain and other great storytellers do-he humanizes people who have been made into icons or demons. Newton Story, about the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and Rodney King, which takes on police brutality in 1991 Los Angeles. Lee, in turn, has worked with Smith on some of his solo theater shows like the Obie Award- winning A Huey P. His body is shown laying in his cell later.Actor, director, and writer Roger Guenvuer Smith has appeared in many of his friend Spike Lee’s movies, including Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X.

Oz: Plan B (1997) : Commits suicide off-screen by slitting his throat.

American Gangster (2007) : Killed off-screen by gangsters/drug smugglers.

Mercenary For Justice (2006) : Killed in an explosion after Steven Seagal remote detonates a bomb planted in his car.

(The explosion is represented by having the scene fade to white.)

Fatwa (2006) : Killed in an explosion when Angus Macfadyen rams Roger's taxicab in an attempt to rescue Lauren Holly, inadvertently detonating Roger's bomb.

His body is later seen when his sister ( Carmen Chaplin) and Tommy Flanagan go to check on him.

All About the Benjamins (2002) : Dies (along with Tony Ward) in a car crash (when their car collides into a glass display case) after Ice Cube and Mike Epps duct tape him into the driver's seat then send the car off at high speed.

Hamlet (2000) : Stabbed/slashed with his own poisoned blade during a swordfight with Campbell Scott.

Tales from the Hood (1995) : Head bashed against a wall after he falls down a flight of stairs when he trips over one of the cursed voodoo dolls, as Corbin Bernsen looks on in shock we later see his funeral.

Deep Cover (1992): Bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by Gregory Sierra as Jeff Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne look on in shock.

King Of New York (1990) : Killed in a fight/shoot-out with the cops or Christopher Walken's cohorts.

Roger Guenveur Smith just before his death in Fatwa

Roger guenveur smith