Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Criticism)

Criticism

John Fiero

Fiero is an experienced actor and a professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he discusses Smith’s skill as a performer of her own material and its role in the effectiveness of her play.

On January 27, 1997, at the New York Town Hall, Anna Deavere Smith moderated a debate between playwright August Wilson and theater pundit Robert Brustein over Wilson’s position that black American playwrights should work within a theater exclusively devoted to black culture. Wilson had taken particular umbrage with the practice of “color-blind-casting,” especially as it pertains to casting black actors in “white” plays. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Wilson’s view, “for a black actor to walk the stage of Western drama was to collaborate with the culture of racism,” to demean, and to rob the actor of his or her true and distinct identity.

Whether or not Wilson is in some ways “an unlikely spokesman for a new Black Arts movement,” as Gates maintains, he has championed a view that seems diametrically opposed to what Smith practices in her multi-cultural, mimetic art. Described by Sharon Fitzgerald as “Anna of a thousand faces,” Smith dons the character of her interviewed subjects without a nanosecond’s regard for the politically-correct idea that actors should portray only what their birthright entitles them to portray. In her one-woman performances of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, she has impersonated an imposing array of real people of different color, sex, national origin, socioeconomic class, political complexion, and age — shedding and donning character guises like a human chameleon.

Her purpose, too, seems antithetical to what Wilson preaches. As Lauren Feldman argues, “Smith inspires us to scrutinize common constructions of race, our own complicity in the events that continue to shape American race relations, and the role of the arts in reproducing or deconstructing social stereotypes.” Thus, in searching for the American character, Smith has elected to deal with actual people at critical junctures in their lives, when their identities and even their lives are at risk. Moreover, she maintains that if American theater is to “mirror society” honestly, it “must embrace diversity.” To that end, she crowds her dramatic canvass with portraits of diverse people caught in moments of reflection on an emotionally charged and violent set of real events. Hers is an assimilative aim, to synthesize such diverse voices into a “more complex language” which “our race dialogue desperately needs.” In contrast, Wilson’s separatist aim seems completely inimical to such a race dialogue.

The niggling question is whether that more complex language is inherent in the text of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 or in the artistry of Smith as actress — or whether, indeed, the two can ever be separated. She has been credited with silencing “all the questions about racial identity in race-specific plays.” For William Sun and Faye Fei, Smith has evolved “a unique genre” that allows her to pirouette convincingly through her characterizations without benefit of masks or makeup. Her range is simply extraordinary, covering a “full spectrum that runs between opposite racial, political, and ideological poles.” In one moment, she is a white, middle-aged male, such as former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates; in the next, through a “morphing” of her face, gestures, posture, and, most of all, her voice, she becomes a female, like Elvira Edwards, the young Panamanian mother, or Elaine Brown, the over-fifty, former head of the Black Panther Party. Then, in a wink of the eye, she is a man again, but this time a proud and angry man, like Mexican-American artist, Rudy Salas, or the old Korean immigrant, Chung Lee, who can only speak in his native tongue. While a backdrop video screen provides footage of the Los Angeles rioting and beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, the remarkable metamorphoses themselves are usually aided with only the barest theatrical amenities: slide projections identifying each character by a caption, name and, brief identifier; some minimal adjustments in stage and hand properties; and some slight costume changes, usually involving only one or two items of dress, like a hat and a shirt, or a pair of shoes and a jacket.

Her rendering of these “characters” has earned Smith warm praise from critics and audiences alike. She has repeatedly awed theater patrons with her rare mimetic gifts, leading more than one commentator to remark on her virtuosity. She has also been praised for her boldness, for her crossing of race, gender and language barriers, for finding and mining the humor that somehow survives the cataclysmic events behind the work, and for her innovative blending of theater arts, journalism and social sciences into that unique genre identified by scholars Sun and Fei.

Wisely, Smith does not depict herself as a character. She simply discards her real persona, the writer who spent countless hours interviewing her subjects. Furthermore, as Michael Feingold remarks, at some point early on in her performance, the actress, Anna Deavere Smith, paradoxically “disappears,” leaving just “men, women, and children, talking in a torrent of diverse languages, living out their anger, their pain, their injuries and resentments and joys and fears.” Each character speaks in a monologue, seldom, if ever, making reference to Smith or revealing the inquiry-response format of the interview process. She delivers their words “verbatim to an audience that often includes her ‘characters’ themselves,” as Sun and Fei have noted. Her great skill in “acting otherness” has convinced even the most dubious members of her audience that she “can be as true as, or even truer than” those real persons she presents to the critical ear and eye.

In the final analysis, Smith does not really disappear during performance. She cannot and does not try to replicate her subjects through elaborate theatrical cloning. The audience is never invited to penetrate any sort of disguise, because, in truth, she never really dons one. Maskless through each of her portrayals, she maintains, however tenuously, her own identity, not as writer but as actress. Furthermore, it is her persistent presence as a black actress that provides a powerful counterpoint to her dramatic portrayals. This “simultaneous presence of performer and performed” is what Richard Schechner calls “doubling,” a quality “that marks great performances.” That is part of Smith’s “shamanic invocation,” a way of inviting the audience to “allow the other in, to feel what the other is feeling,” a way of achieving an extraordinary degree of empathy.

Smith’s play text does not, of course, consist of her own words. As she has indicated, in Twilight she has assembled a “document of what an actress heard in Los Angeles.” In doing so, says Monica Cortes, she “shares the authority of authorship with the community that is the subject of her piece.” Using the actual language of people who normally remain unheard, Smith gives them significant weight, shouldered by the “authority” of their shared authorship.

Yet, because she only recorded what others said, some have questioned her legitimacy as a playwright. Such reservations arise from a strict adherence to a single-author concept, what Iris Smith labels the “modernist notion of authorship.” An alternate model, coming into its own of late, is what she calls “the theater collective,” a method by which “play writing is intertwined with play staging, and often done by the same actors, directors and artists.” Although Anna Smith acts in solo performance, she has worked extensively with dramaturges as collaborators, and has continued to deal with Twilight as a theatrical work in progress, not something forever restricted to the order or inclusiveness of a text which is at once both more and less the play. For critic Smith, Anna Smith qualifies as one of those “willing to risk losing control over the work, if the text can go out and do good work in the world.”

Good work is surely the playwright’s aim. She admits to a polemical purpose, to demonstrate that we “must reach across ethnic boundaries” to achieve some sympathetic understanding in the race dialogue she so fervently seeks. She also admits to being political, the inevitable legacy of her gender and race.“I am political without opening my mouth,” she says; “my presence is political.”

Therein may lie the rub. Smith has expressed an interest in having other actors perform her play, perhaps an ensemble of players. But one must wonder if other interpreters of the text could or would do justice to her purpose — the promotion of a new community dialogue. Sandra Loh, who maintains that Smith’s cross-ethnic depictions involve an “ironic twist,” argues that the actress-playwright could never get away with “impersonating” her array of sexually and racially mixed characters “if she were a white heterosexual male.” Probably not, but more to the point, if the play were interpreted by a white actor, male or female, its meaning would certainly drift off Smith’s intended course, thanks to unavoidable nuances that would result from the “doubling” effect of which Schechner writes.

One must also question whether anyone who has not dealt one-on-one with the real people of Smith’s docudrama could, as Lauren Feldman remarks, “capture the characters with the same convincing compassion.” One suspects that, at the least, Smith herself would have to coach the audacious actor who attempts to follow in her solo-performance footsteps. That possibility, like the community’s memory of the events behind the play, is transitory. It also gives rise to Feldman’s question: “will Twilight lose force with each additional degree of separation?” The answer is probably “yes,” but it will not really matter if the race dialogue that Smith seeks is in authentic progress.

Source: John Fiero, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is from Smith’s On the Road series and employs the same technique. Its focus event is the rioting in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn after the accidental killing of a black child by a Jewish rabbi. Text available as an Anchor Book from Doubleday.
• The Hunger Wall, is a collection of poems by James Ragan, inspired by the Los Angeles civil unrest of 1992 and the peaceful breakup of the former Czechoslovakia a month later (Grove Press, 1995).
• Spell #7 (1979), a play by Ntozke Shange, offers a tremendous contrast to Smith’s work in technique, although both writers are African American women interested in efforts to find an identity in a white-dominated culture.
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), James Agee’s photo-essay study of Georgia sharecroppers gives voice to the anonymous, unheard common man as Smith does in her On the Road series of plays.
• Working (1974) and Coming of Age (1995), two anthologies of oral histories compiled by Studs Terkel, the common man’s historian, which record the voices of ordinary folk interviewed by the author. Smith acknowledges Terkel as one of her mentors; Coming of Age is available from The New Press; Working is available from Ballantine Books.
• “The Street Scene” (1938), Bertolt Brecht’s brief essay on primitive “epic theater,” which excludes the “engendering of illusion” that characterizes traditional theater. Critics have discussed Smith work in terms of Brecht’s theories and practice.
• I Am a Man (1995), by OyamO (Charles Gordon), a play about the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, deals with the civil rights struggle from the perspective of the “unheard,” common man to whom Smith also gives a voice. The focus is on T. O. Jones, a sort of Everyman who sets out to right social injustices.
• The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call, by syndicated columnist Carl T. Rowan, investigates the nation’s “violent decline” and the lack of change for the vast majority of minority Americans since the civil rights upheaval of the 1960s (available from Little, Brown, 1996).