ROGER GUENVEUR
SMITH
Roger Guenveur Smith adapted his Obie Award-winning solo performance of A Huey P. Newton Story into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm currently streaming on Hulu. His Bessie Award-winning Rodney King is on Netflix. Smith premiered Otto Frank, inspired by the father of diarist Anne Frank, at the Public Theater’s 2023 Under the Radar Festival. Also among his history-driven work are Frederick Douglass Now, Christopher Columbus 1992, and Juan And John, inspired by baseball greats Juan Marichal and John Roseboro.
He has also staged studies of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley; iconoclast artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Simon Rodia, and Charles White; and travelogues of Iceland, Panama, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Miami. With Mark Broyard he has devised and performed Inside The Creole Mafia, a “not-too-dark comedy.”
Roger studied at Yale University and Occidental College and has taught at both institutions, as well as Cal Arts, directing his Performing History Workshop.
NEW PLAYS BY
ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH
OTTO FRANK
Otto Frank explores the responsibility Anne Frank’s father, Otto, takes on in seeking to share his daughter’s legacy. This “unnatural reversal of fate” and Frank’s subsequent journey is impossibly intimate: to be introduced to a daughter who, though ripped untimely from his embrace, sought immortality through her diary.
