Solo show revisits brutal moment in baseball history

What would have happened if Abel had survived Cain’s blow? Where would the brothers from the Old Testament story have gone from there?

Along with a real-life incident that played itself out at the San Francisco Giants’ historic Candlestick Park in late August 1965, that provocative hypothetical informs Obie Award-winner Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man show Juan and John. The play will have its premiere West Coast staging at the Kirk Douglas Theatre on Thursday.

The Berkeley, Calif.-born and Crenshaw District-bred writer and actor is a self-admitted history buff — Smith grew up reading Encyclopedia Britannica for fun and had a poster of the U.S. presidents on the wall in his childhood bedroom. Before auditioning for and being accepted to Yale’s prestigious drama program, he arrived at the university with every intention of pursuing a Ph.D. in history.

His fondness for combining his loves of history and acting notwithstanding, Smith’s particular interest in Juan and John’s infamous source material — the most notorious brawl in Major League Baseball history — stems from a much more private place for Smith than run-of-the-mill historical

curiosity.

“I have a very personal stake in this story, because when I was a kid, I was watching the game on TV,” Smith said. “I witnessed this brutal act of violence live.”

The “brutal act of violence” Smith describes that occurred on August 22, 1965, mere feet from home plate in the Giants’ home field of Candlestick Park, so affected him at six years of age that it eventually inspired an entire solo performance. In the bottom of the third inning of a high-stakes game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants — longtime adversaries whose rivalry had been stoked by a particularly tight pennant race in an especially close season — Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro returned the ball to pitcher Sandy Koufax with a throw that was too close to at-bat Giants pitcher Juan Marichal’s ear for the batter’s liking.

Tensions were already running high in the fiercely contested matchup, so the Dominican Marichal’s comment to Ohio-native Roseboro — which Marichal later alleged to Giants manager Herman Franks was nothing more than a harmless “Why did you do that?” — was enough to spur Roseboro to take a step toward Marichal. Interpreting Roseboro’s advance as aggression, Marichal repeatedly clubbed the Dodgers catcher on the head with his bat, opening up a two-inch gash that, while not proving fatal, would later necessitate more than a dozen stitches.

Both the home and away teams’ dugouts quickly emptied as players joined the fray; the ensuing brawl delayed the game for 14 minutes. Marichal’s attack garnered the pitcher an eight-game suspension, earned him a $1,750 fine and was thought to have kept him out of the Baseball Hall of Fame, in spite of the respectable 243 wins on his record.

Watching the awful drama unfold in a live broadcast, the young Roger Guenveur Smith was especially upset because of a strong fondness for the bludgeoned Dodgers catcher Roseboro.

“I was a passionate Dodgers fan, and I was a passionate John Roseboro fan — he was a hero of mine,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Smith’s entirely acceptable excuse for being unable to meet for our scheduled face-to-face sit-down? The birth of his son, one day before previews began for Juan and John.)

By the time of the attack, Smith had already met Roseboro at a community event and had been given an autographed photo of the player. His loyalties were cemented from there on out.

“When [Roseboro] was bleeding there on my television screen, I became so upset with what Juan Marichal had done that I took Juan Marichal’s baseball card out of my collection and I burned it,” Smith said. “I chanted ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ because that’s what I had heard on the streets of L.A. just a week before that during the Watts riots.”

Smith’s timeline is accurate. The spate of violent unrest that swept through South L.A. had its generally acknowledged inciting incident — the arrest of an apparently intoxicated black motorist named Marquette Frye by California Highway Patrol officer Lee Minikus — only eleven days before the Marichal-Roseboro incident took place.

“I was upset because it was my hero, John Roseboro, who was bleeding,” Smith said. “But of course, it was 1965, and Watts was exploding, Vietnam was exploding, the Dominican Republic, in fact, was occupied by 23,000 U.S. troops.”

Growing up, Smith’s nickname “Hollywatts” — an amalgam of ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Watts’ — acknowledged the peculiar geographic position occupied by Smith’s neighborhood, the Crenshaw District. According to Smith, the dichotomy of his nickname accurately captures his experiences growing up in L.A., and the feeling of sometimes belonging to two worlds.

If his 2006 solo performance The Watts Tower Project, a celebration of Italian construction worker Simon Rodia’s iconic architectural assemblage, is any indication, Smith is fully appreciative of what a significant and formative impact his Los Angeles upbringing had on him.

In spite of the highly public nature of the Marichal-Roseboro news story when it first broke, Smith harbors no delusions that the incident will be immediately familiar to anyone.

“I don’t expect a general theatergoing audience to know anything about Juan Marichal and John Roseboro,” Smith said. “It was a long time ago. But it’s an extraordinary story. It continues to resonate, and I’d like to think that the play resonates for people who don’t know anything or even care anything about baseball because, bottom line, it’s the story of Cain and Abel.”

Though the chief source of material for Smith’s one-man show is technically an isolated moment in history, and the story is told through his experience of it, the creator-performer sees the show as being much more universal in scope.

“It’s much more than that. It’s about politics, it’s about family and forgiveness and redemption, all of those things.”