I like to show you that person because that’s who you all come to see. This is the man who once told a bunch of reporters before a fight, “I know at times I come across like a Neanderthal or a babbling idiot, but I like that person. There’s no reason for narrative filler when Tyson is one of the few boxing champions whose mind is alive to the problems of fighting as a spectacle. The premise of “Undisputed” seems to be that boxing isn’t a worthy subject for storytelling, that Tyson’s career in the ring is nothing more than the backstory for a canned celebrity redemption tale. At least Harry Houdini, who spent his later years speaking out against magic, had enough regard for his art to debunk it. But if these people were truly fans, they would have demanded to hear something substantive about Tyson’s experience as a boxer. The only thing that prevented me from doing that was the menacingly partisan audience, almost wall-to-wall wise guys and wannabes, who clapped with Stalinist discipline at each cheap applause line. Who thought that it would be a good idea to send Tyson off on a pitifully long rant about his ex-wife Robin Givens? Somewhere in the third act of this ugly little play-within-a-play, when Tyson began making sophomoric cracks at a photo of Givens’s mother, I considered standing up and booing.
Some of this jaggedness is to be expected-what would be more dishonest and insufferable than a slick Broadway version of Tyson?īut this doesn’t excuse some of the show’s godawful narrative decisions. Although structured as an intimate slide show, the performance feels more like a slavishly chronological series of boozy barroom reminiscences, complete with the high-spiritedness, the cringe-inducing settling of scores, the wallowing, the feints of solemnity, and occasional blubbering incoherence built into that form. “Mike Tyson: The Undisputed Truth” was directed by Spike Lee, written by Tyson’s wife, Kiki, and attended by Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Bryant Gumbel. Mike Tyson wants to be left alone on stage. Like every serious analysand, Tyson entices us by hovering constantly on the verge of a “breakthrough.” Who else goes live on the “Today” show and affably speculates, in the spirit of breakfast chatter, that his veganism can be traced to a former compulsion to frequent prostitutes? Sonny Liston was a man who wanted to be left alone. In person, it’s mostly his lisping wit, the unpredictable turns of his Woody Allen meets Genghis Khan shtick, that continue to surprise. It is precisely his arena-sized isolation, his painfully live, often apocalyptic solo performances that have made him a person of fascination for two and half decades. His opponents always seemed beside the point. Frazier-Tyson never had a true antagonist. Unlike those fighters whose legacies were carved out in collaboration with rivals-Louis vs. After watching Mike Tyson’s one-man show on Broadway, it all seems so obvious: his life has always been a one-man show.
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