By Kerry Lengel

We live in an age of memoir, when people hunger for authentic stories about identity and redemption. But Lemon Andersen, the street poet who went from Rikers Island to Broadway, was reluctant at first to tell his own story.

“The question kept being asked, because I was probably the only Broadway performer to ever have three felonies,” says Andersen, who was part of the Tony Awardwinning cast of “Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway” in 2002-03.

“So I thought, maybe I should just write the story.”

The result is “County of Kings,” a critically acclaimed one-man show titled after the New York county that shares its borders with the Borough of Brooklyn where he was born and raised. Andersen will perform the piece Friday and Saturday, Oct. 5-6, as part of the ASU Gammage Beyond series.

Andersen, who gets his surname from the Norwegian half of his heritage, was raised by his Puerto Rican family in a housing project called the Courtyards. It was an island of poverty in the rather well-to-do Park Slope neighborhood.

“Nothing was worse in my neighborhood than the building I grew up in,” he says. “And the hardest part about it was most of it came from us. It came from me, it came from my mother’s upbringing. So that’s my Brooklyn story.”

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