The Actor as Solo Artist
Using Samuel Beckett as a way “into his own voice,” (Krapp’s Last Tape), remembering his penchant for Dick Gregory’s routines (“Were You There When They Crucified the Lord?”) and the urbane absurdism of playwrights like Charles Fuller (Zooman & The Sign) and Israel Horovitz (Spared) - that first instigated his solo performances throughout NYC in the late 1990s, Kangalee got back up on the horse and reclaimed his stature as a monologist in 2011. Fusing the absurd, the political and personal confession in one. This initially resulted in his “punk-rock” performances as the Nomad Junkie (Gentrified Minds), a poetic alter-ego that enabled him to preach passionately and recite holy rants about unemployment, homelessness, class warfare…even love. Again, the mask of the metropolitan troubadour eventually spilled over into his approach slipped…revealing the essential qualities that makes up Kangalee’s prowess as a performer: his neurotic edge, droll humor, manic tangents, comedic timing, political commentary, and his penchant for the surreal. The 2025 SMILE: A Clown’s Ascension was the pinnacle of this.
Three decades after he had established himself as an adept soloist, Kangalee returned to the very impulse that first led him into the voyage of self discovery and “acting with a purpose” - the MONOLOGUE.
Kangalee in 2009, Actors Studio — after a reading of his poem “Lying Meat'“ which was the genesis for his soloist Nomad Junkie persona
Continuing his “Investigations of a Clown” concept which began with the ceaseless workshopping of Beckett’s early and late monologues in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic, Kangalee leapt five years later into the cosmic void to express that remarkable, but tormented, desire that artists undeniably possess:” breaking on through” to the other side in order to grant an audience something “holy.”
In October 2025, for the first time ever, the most mysterious story Henry Miller ever wrote was adapted to the stage by DC poet/author Magus Magnus & Dennis Leroy Kangalee. Kangalee is now the very first artist to ever accomplish the adapting and performing of Miller’s words on the stage! SMILE: A Clown’s Ascension was brought to the fore by J. Stock Productions and the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur with the blessings of the Henry Miller Estate.
“This was the first commission of its kind and it is befitting that an outlaw maverick artist should perform and adapt Henry Miller.”
As if Krapp was 30 years younger: Kangalee’s Auguste was an odd and radical assembly of Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Bert williams and Henry Miller himself. [Photo: Susan Kingsland]
Henry Miller’s 1948 haunting short story The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, had plagued Kangalee since the winter of 1995 when he first read it in the midst of a crippling depression as an acting student at Juilliard. For some reason he connected to Miller’s clown. This parable about a circus clown who wishes to imbue everlasting joy to his audience is a mirror of the artist's struggle- one that is nearly biblical in its truth and caution. Recognizing this, Dennis Leroy Kangalee melts the journey of Auguste, the veritable "fool on the hill", with that of the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Kaufman, the spirit of the great modern clowns from Charlie Chaplin & Charles Lane to George Carlin & Richard Pryor, Jordan Neely, a victim of a racist murder, and even echoes of Miller himself -- in a cubistic and highly modern performance that presents both a self-portrait an illumination of the society that creates the conditions of which, often, the greatest art is made.
“A Clown is a poet in action.”
SMILE was Kangalee’s most recent, and most spiritually autobiographical, performance art. And he had waited nearly 30 years to fulfill his desire to perform this work.
Kangalee after the final performance held at the Henry Memorial Library in Big Sur. He was given a Miller lithograph upon his closing night.
Preceding SMILE, was The Beckett Project: Two solo works that intrigued Kangalee was Krapp’s Last Tape, which he first performed in 1996 Juilliard, and Beckett’s latter “Rockaby” - which he directed, starring New Canon founder Justine Smith.
A result of a year-long workshop, the first iteration of KRAPP'S LAST TAPE in 2022 at Studio 111 in Brooklyn - was both an act of love and courage and was a gentle reminder of the power of live performance and the eternal impact of powerful words. On the heels of having gotten Covid-19, Dennis Leroy Kangalee used what he learned while convalescing and put that into his performance. A project that was only close to his heart but the core of what the company believes: by doing plays we expand our humanity. We learn and discover our similarities in the topical differences. This is where theater can be fun and dangerous: in celebrating differences and receiving wisdom in other “modes” of life or cultures, we find our own selves and reflect the likenesses. This act is liberating.
As Krapp in the Kangalee’s initial production of his “Krapp’s Last Tape” at Studio 111 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November, 2022. It was the first time he had performed publicly in over a decade.
Rehearsals began in December 2024 for the Carl West Coast premiere of the special program. It had been the third time Kangalee had performed Krapp before an audience and the first time Stock had ever performed Samuel Beckett’s work. It was an enthralling, daring experience. Read more about it here.
The 2011 performance of Gentrified Minds at the New York Downtown Urban Theater Festival, organized by Reginald Goines (Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk) was touchstone because it was the first time since his film, As an Act of Protest, that his own writing had been performed or made public. Taking it a step further, Kangalee challenged by singing and acting as front man for a fictitious punk band that backed up his poetry and monologues and helping to create three actual original songs! Gentrified Minds was the culmination of thoughts, anxieties, frustration and anger against New York’s rapid suburbanization and sterile corporatization. Gentrification was its height…and it impacted even the soul and minds of New Yorkers. Once again, he attacked racism, tourist freakdom, and the entire carnival pop culture and New York had become. Language itself was taking a dive, the first sign that some kind “end” was near.
Performing as alter-ego, Nomad Junkie, in “Gentrified Minds” (2011, NYC)
Gentrified Minds was the first time Kangalee created monologues out of poems and the first time he allowed a rawness and righteous anger to imbue the forms of his writing. Meaning the shape of his actual words and performance style inferred the spirit of the text. Form followed function in the most distilled singular way: THROUGH the actor.
Dennis Leroy Kangalee as the Nomad Junkie, a wandering punk-poet who decries the destruction of the working class ethos and artistic forces of cities like New York…
The 2025 Action Lab Fellowship gave Kangalee two opportunities: to develop a new play out of his solo material and to. workshop the text with no worry or stress about producing a “final product.” The first iteration of My Dying City, which started as an assembly of monologues eventually developed into a poetic portrait about modern revolution and then developed into the chamber drama the world now knows as My Dying City Vol.II (The Social Justice Suicide Hour), a play that is at once personal as it political and a work that struggles to not only understand how to grieve…but how to remain vigilant in the fight against Capitalist terror and white supremacy enabled by nearly every aspect of American culture.
MY DYING CITY VOLUME 1: The Action Lab Workshop. ‘The Radical Spalding Gray’: Kangalee’s manic proselytizing results in either a confession or a revelation about what he has learned about life. (Photo: Pamela Rozon, Action Lab, May 1, 2025 at JACK)