A Huey P. Newton Story. - theater reviews

African American Review, Winter, 1997 by Victor Leo Walker, II

At certain moments during the performance Newton calls out to the audience expecting a response. When a response doesn't come, a voice with a deep register responds over the sound system, and the voice talks to Newton for short intervals, asking him questions about "the movement," about the audience, and about current events. It is the voice of Marc Anthony Thompson, live sound designer for the show. These moments are important because they help to deconstruct the wall between Newton and the audience, and they provide short musical interludes related to the subject matter of a previous or upcoming scene.

Roger Smith bears an uncanny resemblance to Newton, and for those of us who were old enough to remember the Black Panther Party and the image of Newton in the late 1960s, Smith's performance at times is unsettling because you are emotionally transported in time back to that moment when the revolution and the Black Panthers were real. The power of Roger Smith's performance also lies in his ability to tell a story with passion and irony. At the performance I attended (March 29, 1997), the majority of the audience was over forty and Black, and the response Smith received from Black audience members was enthusiastic. Smith moved in and out of the space between him and the audience with the ease of a gifted storyteller who knows when to include his audience as a participant in the story and when to step back from the audience and allow them to experience the story without their direct involvement.

Roger Smith's A Huey P. Newton Story is a powerful tale about a man who, during the late 1960s and 1970s, came to occupy a prominent position among Black revolutionaries, and who has been mythologized in books, documentaries, films, and the popular media. Roger Smith's performance exposes truths that myths often times don't tell. To bear witness to these truths, in the case of A Huey P. Newton Story, is a moving theatrical experience that is poetry and pathos, sublime and grotesque.