Now, Smith is in the throes of creation with Juan and John, playing through December 20 in the Public Theater’s LAB Series, for which all tickets are $10. Newton-conjuring a Creole social club during Mardi Gras, or the Watts Towers in his native Los Angeles-Smith is a showman before a historian (at Yale, he left his graduate studies in History for the Drama School), often interweaving his riveting, electric solo performances with music by frequent collaborator Marc Anthony Thompson of Chocolate Genius. Whether he’s taking on Frederick Douglass or Huey P. But the writer-performer doesn’t just know it, he lets it under his skin, manipulates it, re-imagines it, and embodies it in shows that are as much about the here-and-now as they are about where we came from. Roger Guenveur Smith is a man who knows his history.
