{"id":731,"date":"2012-10-01T14:27:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T21:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2012\/10\/remembering-rodney-king.html"},"modified":"2012-10-01T14:27:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-01T21:27:00","slug":"remembering-rodney-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2012\/10\/remembering-rodney-king.html","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Rodney King"},"content":{"rendered":"

IT’S not often that a theater performance stops me cold. But last week’s Rodney King, a one-man-show by\u00a0Roger Guenveur Smith at the Bootleg Theater left me both impressed and a little shaken up at the very least.<\/p>\n

<\/a>When I moved to LA in 1997, the city seemed like a sunny, youthful, high-spirited place after a few years in New England. But underneath the good times, there was a sense that I was living on the scene of a crime, one connected to an four-century old Original Sin.<\/p>\n

A kind of scar seemed ripped through the city \u00a0when I drove past the intersection of Florence and Normandie or along Olympic Blvd — names I first heard in news broadcasts. Nineties LA was, for me, simultaneously hedonistic and haunted.<\/p>\n

All this came back to me at the Bootleg the other night. I should not say anymore — I’ll add that while this was a one-man-show by most measures, the sound design and lighting were excellent and made the whole thing work, and the Bootleg is becoming one of my favorite venues in town.<\/p>\n

I won’t say anything else about his King performance, except to say that Smith was sparked to put it together by King’s death on Father’s Day.<\/p>\n

I wrote about Smith here<\/a>, last year. Here’s hoping that several of his shows, including this powerful, painful Rodney King project, get return engagements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IT’S not often that a theater performance stops me cold. But last week’s Rodney King, a one-man-show by\u00a0Roger Guenveur Smith at the Bootleg Theater left me both impressed and a little shaken up at the very least. When I moved to LA in 1997, the city seemed like a sunny, youthful, high-spirited place after a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[114,30,115,97],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-731","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-black-history","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"category-ought-nostalgia","9":"category-theater","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}