An actor needs a script. But Roger Guenveur Smith, opening a one-man show on Tuesday night, was seemingly without one as he fell into singsong cadences, set off with different accents and little bursts of emotional intensity, as he talked, in chains of anecdotes circling around one another, about his father, his life and Bob Marley. The background music fell into repeating patterns, over and over and over, while videos (seascapes, montages of Guenveur family snapshots) played on a screen behind him. The whole thing was slightly bewildering and slightly boring. Somebody get this man an author.
The actor Roger Guenveur Smith. Behind him is a photo of Bob Marley.
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The show is called “Who Killed Bob Marley?” and Tuesday’s performance was the inaugural event opening the newly renovated Gatehouse as a performance space for Harlem Stage. Built in the late 19th century as a transit point where water from the Croton Reservoir was redistributed around the city, it is an odd, stubby, towered building, with massive water pipes standing guard outside; inside, it is a welcoming space, its soft old yellow walls inset with red arches that now mark a kind of proscenium as well as the exit doors on each side.
“We overuse the water metaphor,” warned Patricia Cruz, Harlem Stage’s executive director, in pre-performance remarks to an overflow crowd waiting patiently (for about half an hour) until seating could be found for everyone. The first series in the 192-seat theater, which opens with Mr. Smith’s play, is called “WaterWorks.”
Water played a role in “Who Killed Bob Marley?,” but so did family, Jamaica and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mr. Smith has done several successful evening-length monologues (“A Huey P. Newton Story,” “Frederick Douglass Now”); the problem with this one is that it focused on a figure without the historical interest of Mr. Smith’s other subjects, and toward whom he cannot be said to have a balanced objectivity: namely himself.
He did, of course, have a script, or at least a plan of action — he has been developing this piece for some time — but he doled out information in nuggets that a listener had to work to assemble into a whole picture, like a jigsaw puzzle missing some of its pieces. Exhorting the audience not to confuse fact and fiction, he deliberately blended the two, assisted by the video of the cinematographer Arthur Jafa, which juxtaposed snapshots from Mr. Smith’s childhood with a movie Mr. Smith and Mr. Jafa made in Jamaica about a suicidal American poet named Arthur. Marc Anthony Thompson’s music was alternately soothing and, when it became stuck in one place for too long, irritating.
The role Bob Marley played in all this was symbolic of the piece: it was pervasive, oblique and uncertain. (Mr. Smith heard Marley perform at the Apollo; there’s a photo of the two of them together.) It was one more tantalizing element in a not uninteresting piece that left you wondering what the story actually was.
The Gatehouse is a happy addition to New York City’s cultural life, and its laudable goal is to give artists a space of their own. But there’s such a thing as too much space: and Mr. Smith, with this show, had it.
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