Rodney King (2017)

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Rodney King (2017)

Rodney King (2017) is a one-man stage show about the life and times of Rodney King by the actor and writer Roger Guenveur Smith. Smith shares the story using breath-taking poetry that inhabits King and the shocks with a sympathetic chorus.

Plot

Smith talks about King's life, including his two-year life in jail and his experience after beating as someone who never wants to be famous for it. Some of the time, Smith talks as the narrator, but some other time he will start play as King, or other characters. [1]

Racial bias and discrimination

The show is a preacher’s howl of anger and frustration at the personal and political forces which crushed King – racism, alcoholism, depression, crime, poverty, alienation and his own poignant unpreparedness for a media maelstrom – just as his dismissal from some after his all around expected request for everybody to "get along".

Smith's explaining the Racism and Police Brutality that Rodney King went through, on those days and their aftermath. With its stunning pleasantry and thickly layered bounty of history and life story, Rodney King is an encounter however cerebral as it seems to be instinctive. Smith’s powerfully crafted performance does nothing less than restore the humanity to a man who has, over a quarter-century, been reduced to a talking point and a symbol. [2]

Smith offers a sharp knowledge when he says that Rodney King was history's first unscripted television star. His big-name originated before the cell phone and online media age, and he circulated around the web before such a term existed. In any case, the show implicitly underscores a bigger truth: individuals acknowledged it was the "unplanned" recording of the episode that was uncommon, not simply the beating. Such a lawfully deniable thing was going on constantly – it simply hadn't been shot previously. And afterward, King turned into a more ordinary kind of unscripted television star: an untrustworthy, powerless, dazed soul, consuming the payout he got from the common suit and taking money for showing up on shows that solitary broadened his forlorn experience. [3]

References

  1. Seitz, Matt Zoller. Rodney King. Roger Ebert. 29 April 2017. Retrieved January 15 2021
  2. Linden, Sheri ‘Rodney King’: TV Review. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved January 15 2021.
  3. Rodney King review – Spike Lee's Netflix special is a bleakly poetic howl of rage. The Guardian. Retrieved January 15 2021.