Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Undisputed Truth: Tyson enters ring with himself
NEW YORK — Perhaps you are among the millions of Americans who have muttered, “If I hear one more aging celebrity trying to make a buck by spinning his youthful debaucheries and misdeeds into a redemption story, I’m going to bust him in the nose.”
If so, you might want to stay away from the Longacre Theater. The guy doing just such a spin job on the stage there could punch you back in a way that your face would not soon forget.
He’s Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, and his one-man show, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, which runs through Sunday, is among the odder spectacles Broadway has seen in a while. Tyson, 45, is doing little more than relating his well-publicized life story, and, under Spike Lee’s direction, he’s doing so with a clumsiness startling to see on a Broadway stage (and at a ticket price that tops out at $199).
Yet that incongruous, almost childlike Tyson charm pokes through occasionally and makes you momentarily forget how ham-handed and manipulative the show is. Sure, we should save our accolades for the many people who have transcended difficult beginnings without abusing drugs, racking up a rape conviction and biting off a piece of another guy’s ear. But by the end of Undisputed Truth you may at least be willing to grant that it would be swell if Tyson has finally found a nondestructive way to exist in the world.
The show, written by Tyson’s wife, Kiki Tyson, is mostly aimed at Tyson’s fans, alluding to rather than detailing the signature events in his life in a way calculated to draw whoops of support from the audience. But it’s a lazily structured biographical tour even for that audience.
Lee, who attached himself to the show after a version of it appeared in Las Vegas in April, has not brought to it the dramatic ebb and flow of his best movies. No one point is particularly higher or lower than any other, and some personal milestones, like Tyson’s initial winning of a championship in 1986, are skipped entirely.
There are overly long stretches in which Tyson trashes Robin Givens, his former wife; Mitch Green, a boxer with whom Tyson had an out-of-the-ring altercation in 1988; and the boxing promoter Don King. There is a strident denial that he raped a Miss Black America contestant in 1991, a crime for which he served three years in prison.
And there are awkward efforts to wring sympathy out of the deaths of three people who Tyson tells us very little about: his mother, his sister and one of his children. Lee does nothing to help Tyson set up these should-be-poignant moments; they materialize without warning in the midst of the otherwise jaunty, lighthearted, profane narrative, and the audience is supposed to adopt instant somberness. Then, just as abruptly, it’s back to the jaunty narrative. Tyson isn’t nearly a skilled enough performer to pull off those kinds of transitions.
He is, though, surprisingly amusing when the script lets him be. Early in the show Tyson is talking about his childhood in Brooklyn, and a picture is projected of the building where he lived, which apparently has had a makeover since Tyson lived there. “It didn’t look like this,” Tyson says, looking at the image with a wry contempt. “Spike just took this picture last week.”
And his description of the dumps he fought in early in his career is comically vivid.
“If the crowd didn’t like your performance,” he says, “they didn’t boo you, they started fighting among themselves, to show you how it was done.”
Tyson has been known to make fun of his own poor diction, most memorably in a skit on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and untangling his verbiage is a constant challenge during this two-hour, intermissionless show. Doing so rewards you with a few laughs but no real insights, especially on the most central question: What turned Mike Tyson, who was until relatively recently a volatile man with a knack for making bad decisions, into the guy we’re seeing now, a fellow who appears to be at peace with and able to laugh at himself?
Passing mentions of his wife and veganism provide hints of an answer, but, as with many other points in this show, the opportunity to inject something substantive into the proceedings is allowed to pass, and Tyson’s story just sort of runs out of gas. That leaves the audience unable to make an educated guess as to whether the new, improved Iron Mike will stick around, or whether Tyson will fall off one wagon or another as he has so often in the past.