Dennis Leroy Kangalee after his closing night performance, October 19, 2025 at The Henry Miller Memorial Library. The finale was a historic moment in Big Sur.

Photo: Susan Kingsland

SMILE: A CLOWN’S ASCENSION was written by Magus Magnus & Dennis Leroy Kangalee - based on Henry Miller’s short story “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.”

Art is blood. A smile is holy.

The state is horror.

And the clown refuses to die.

This historic commission, supported by the Henry Miller Memorial Library and sanctioned by the Miller Estate, marked a rare theatrical reimagining of Miller’s haunting tale of Auguste, a circus clown who seeks to give humanity joy and is crucified for it.

“Dennis Leroy Kangalee, in a performance of a lifetime, delivered a compassionate, funny, and blistering monologue that was poetry in motion: compressing an entire lifetime of pain, laughter, resistance and romance into a mere 50 minutes.” — American Theater

SMILE: A Clown’s Ascension was co-written by poet Magus Magnus (Idylls for a Bare Stage) and Dennis Leroy Kangalee, who had been preparing to play the part of Auguste for over 25 years. Performances ran October 15–19, 2025 at The Carl Cherry Theater in Monterey, with a closing performance at Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. It was produced by J STOCK PRODUCTIONS & THE HENRY MILLER MEMORIAL LIBRARY.

Part soliloquy, part punk-rock fever dream, the one-hour performance merges Miller’s original short story with newly devised dialogue and poetry by Magnus and Kangalee. It strips theater down to its raw essentials, seeking both tenderness and transcendence in the act of performance.

 Themes of art and suffering, the holiness of clowns, the brutality of the state, and the purity of a smile converge in this ritualistic meditation on the artist’s role in an oppressive world.