It’s a heartwarming story and it reminded me of one that Roger Guenveur Smith tells in his show In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The equally moving scene in his show centers around how the young Roger was inspired by his father who worked as an elevator operator in the Capital, where he suffered various indignities but dreamed of a better life for his son.
Part of what makes those references so powerful is that both Ming-Trent and Smith are black and the fact that they’re telling these stories in such places as, respectively, The Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, offers living proof that they’ve overcome the adversity and other disadvantages of their boyhoods. It’s the kind of up-from-their-bootstraps stuff that audiences love.
But what really connects the two shows for me is that those anecdotes are only partially true. In an interview he gave when his show played at the Folger Theatre earlier this year, Ming-Trent discloses that his father was a novelist and his grandmother, a journalist and poet (click here to hear more). Smith’s Wikipedia page says that his father was a judge.
Now I’m not trying to rag on these guys. It’s possible that Ming-Trent’s dad was a novelist and an addict. And maybe Smith’s dad went to school at night, got his law degree and worked his way up to the bench. Besides, as the old saying goes, when it comes to fictional or theatrical narratives, the truth should never get in the way of a good story.
Still, these shows also reveal a different, and at least for me, more uncomfortable truth: theater producers and audiences continue to feel most comfortable with stories about black people who are downtrodden. And that may be handicapping artists who want to tell black stories. Because as talented as Ming-Trent and Smith are—Ming-Trent was a terrific Falstaff in the Public’s Merry Wives of Windsor a few summers ago and Smith won an Obie for his performance as the leader of the Black Panthers in A Huey P Newton Story—neither of their current solo shows really work.
Because their foundations are shaky, the stories are wobbly too, veering off in directions that don’t really make sense. How did a homeless Ming-Trent find the money to make his way from Pittsburgh to New York? His story skips over that. Did Smith and the celebrated artist Basquiat have more than a passing acquaintanceship? His story sidesteps that.
Both Ming-Trent and Smith are such charismatic presences that their shows are still entertaining and they're smart enough to keep them short. But it’s clear that each wanted to focus on something other than the stereotypical dysfunctions that the larger society continues to associate with being black in America.
Ming-Trent is passionate about the connection he sees between Shakespeare and hip-hop artists like Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. And he’s terrific when he’s quoting lines from all three. Meanwhile, Smith is most committed to exploring the challenges that black artists of all stripes—including those from middle-class, or even affluent, backgrounds—face. Those objectives get somewhat lost in these shows.
If unshackled from having to incorporate trauma tropes into their work, both writer-performers might have been able to create more complex narratives. But I don’t know if mainstream theatrical gatekeepers are ready to let them do that.
However, they might want to beware. In 2020, the writer-director Rhada Blank released her semi-autobiographical film “The 40-Year-Old Version” about a black playwright who abandons the theater after a white producer encourages her to put more black suffering into her work. Her response before leaving was to strangle him
