A fire in a crowded theatre Anna Deavere Smith relives the Los Angeles riots. Essay Example For Students

A fire in a crowded theatre: Anna Deavere Smith relives the Los Angeles riots. Essay Interviewing Anna Deavere Smith is intimidating. The 42-year-old African-American playwright and actor faces a journalists taperecorder armed with a casual confidence learned from conducting literally hundreds of interviews. No doubt shes heard and asked every conceivable question. Aristocratic in posture, a relatively tall 59, with a Medusa head of curls, Smith also has the grace under pressure of a veteran war correspondent exactly what she is. But the wars Anna Deavere Smith covers are never overseas. Her wars are as Americans as Watts. Since 1983, Smith has been taping conversations with primarily ordinary people for an epic performance series titled On the Road: A Search for American Character. Onstage, she recites verbatim excerpts from these interviews while transforming herself into the speaker. Last year, this monologue series received international acclaim when a segment, Fires in the Mirror, premiered at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Based on the August 1991 clash between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Fires in the Mirror earned a special Obie citation and the Lucille Lortel Award, then finished runner-up in Pulitzer Prize balloting to Tony Kushners celebrated Angels in America. The media anointed Smith the public spokesman on American race relations. Magazines and television talk shows clamor for her. PBS put Fires on American Playhouse in April, under the direction of George C. Wolfe. But Smith has been unavailable to the majority of interview requests because her current project is far more challenging than any work shes ever attempted. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, running through July 18 at the Mark Taper Forum, s a result of more than 175 interviews and months of research into the citys 1992 riots. Driving from a Watts district that resembles Beirut to Hollywood soundstages where the riots are being dramatized, past burnt-out Korean mini-malls and to the Simi Valley courthouse where it all ignited, Smith spoke with anyone who might offer some coherence to the chaos. She interviewed Mayor Tom Bradley and former police chief Dary 1 F. Gates, Anjelica Huston and Rodney Kings Aunt Angela, gang members and cops, ministers and administrators, artists and graffiti taggers, lawyers and clients, surgeons and thugs. The Taper staff, anticipating controversy and eager to explore their personal experiences of the riots, reorganized their development process to support the ambitious world premiere. Smith received a car, cellular phone and driver, translators and transcribers, Hispanic and Asian-American dramaturgs, video technicians, as well as focus group discussions with southern Californias ethnic minorities. Emily Mann, whose Execution of Justice resembled Smiths docudramas, was hired to direct, and Oskar Eustis, who commissioned both Execution and Angels in America, was drafted to oversee the process. Stanford University, where Smith has taught drama since 1990, recognized the significance of this project and granted her leave. After all, she teaches a course called Breaking Down Barriers: Beyond Stereotypes of Race and Gender, which could serve as subtitle for Twilight (But Smiths academic style is just as unorthodox as her theatrical work: Her students performed an Arsenio Hall Show and staged the Oprah Winfrey interview with Michael Jackson.) Despite such support, Twilight is an epic challenge, shifting with each news headline, suspended between the sentencing of two police officers in the King civil rights case and the trial of black suspects in the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny. Literally living theatre that speaks with an unprecedented immediacy, it resembles South Africas Theatre of Testimony, which emerged from the Township tradition of acting out a communitys stories. It is also reminiscent of Caryl Churchills joint Stock Company in England. Smith stands alone onstage, reciting monologues about the riots to audiences who experienced the riots-and who live in fear and dread of another uprising. The tensions, resentments and violence that crossed lines of gender, race and class get mirrored in one woman. But in presenting the politics of race, Smith is careful to avoid dogma. Her goal is to create an urban Rashomon that promotes discussion without media interference. Although a series of monologues, Twilight is also a dialogue with the other-the audience. And so, while interviewing Smith, one remains aware of her receptive personality. She watches you watching her. She listens to you listen. just as she does onstage, she absorbs the sensibility and the rhythms of your questions. Chameleonlike, she subtly impersonates your style, your idiosyncratic physical mannerisms, and ultimately seems to tap into your mind exactly the way shes tapped into the collective mind of wartorn Los Angeles. STAYTON: The first preview of Fires in the Mirror at the Pubhc was canceled because the Los Angeles riots seemed on the verge of spreading to Manhattan. Shortly after ft opened, Gordon Davidson invited you to create an original work for the Mark Taper Forum. You immediately proposed a piece on the so-called uprising. Why back-to-back pieces on race riots? Mary Shelley EssayRap artist Sister Souljah wouldnt  talk to you, saying, Thats the sister  who wants to take my words.  Jim Brown, the former professional  football player, also was reluctant. He said no. But then I heard he was having a meeting at his house for the national anti-gang organization, Amer-I-Can, and I went there. Jim Brown walked in and asked, What are you frowning about? And I knew he would give me an interview. But while there I met an equally interesting man by the name of Twilight. Hes changed the way I think. Hes probably 24 and has been responsible for the truce . I marvel at how at peace he seems to be in a world full of violence, South Central L.A. Hes really the guardian of his group and definitely watches out for everybody. Did his name inspire the title? In part. A lot of the unrest happened at twilight. Twilight is a limbo time when you cant tell if its light or dark. It can mean the time just before sunrise or just after sunset. Twilight is the first time youre  using video imagery. Because media was almost like a character during the riots. People relied on the media for information. Those who couldnt get any other help used the media as a vehicle for communication. But its tricky to find a balance between the video and the spoken word, because the spoken word is not spectacle. Even though Im a writer, Im more interested in the spoken part of what I do. All the written part comes as an afterthought. The only reason Im making a script is so that Emily Mann can do her work. Im sure this process has some of its roots in African-American history, the black tradition of oral history. But the notion of speech influencing the body really came from my classical training in acting school, which is probably what informs my work more than anything. I trained at ACT under Bill Ball, learning a technique he called Heroics. We worked with a voice teacher and a movement teacher at the same time. Ive used that as the basis of the way I listen to people and the way I work with myself. I treat normal talk like its classical text. What do you call your kind of  theatre? I call myself a lot of different things. I say its docudrama. I say its performance art, because people have called it that. I call myself a repeater. A re-iterator, rather than i mimic or an impersonator. Of course, its story theatre. The people I select to perform are always great story-tellers. As a playwright, what do you listen  for during an interview? Im mostly interested in when people fail to say something, like when they maybe say the wrong word or get caught in stutters, because I think character really exists in the struggle to say something. In my more hopeful days I think that American character moves in the struggle to negotiate difference, not in the few moments of success that weve had in trying to figure it out. When somebody talks, they may say wonderful things, but if I were to dwell on those Id end up with 30-second sound bites. Im more interested in their pursuit for the perfect sound bite. When language just doesnt work, when it fails, when it falls apart, it usually ends up being a moment or a time, once I try to re-enact it, that brings me closer to what I would think of as the feeling of that person. Then I really begin to feel that its not me, that theres somebody else in there. Thats when you begin to wear  words, as you put it. How did  you first arrive at this process? It all started from watching the Tonight Show in 1979 when Sophia Loren defied the whole language and structure of the show. Nobody laughed. The band stopped playing. And then she was followed by Joan Rivers, who knows the rhythm like nobody else, and she not only reinstated the rhythm, she worked the whole audience into a kind of hysteria. So I thought: This show is about America. I didnt know why. I was very interested in how Lorens presence emerged by her resistance to participate in our language. And then I started watching interview shows on television, looking for these places where the rhythm of the show would fail, or when a persons language would fail. Originally, I was just like paparazzi, like a crazy person, watching interview shows and tape recording them and sitting up all night transcribing them. And then I decided that ordinary people offered more interesting interviews than celebrities. What did you hope to achieve?