Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles, 1992 Since 1979, African American actress, playwright, and teacher, Anna

Deavere Smith has been creating a series o f one-woman show performances entitled On the Road: A Search fo r American Character.

Smith’s focus shifted from individuals to groups o f individuals at gatherings, or as members o f a community. The series includes Building Bridges Not Walls (1985), On Black Identity and Black Theatre (1990), Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities (1993), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), and House Arrest (1997). A celebrated personality as much as a celebrated artist, Smith has functioned as a commentator on politics, sociology, educa­

tion, as well as theatre.2

For more details about Anna Deavere Smith’s career, see for instance, Carol Martin’s interview - “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becom es Y ou.”

Sm ith’s innovative documentary theatre and acting practices have unleashed vivid debates and provoked a plethora o f scholarly articles.

While Dorinne Kondo considers Smith as “one o f the key originators o f documentary performance” (1994: 96), Ryan Claycomb calls her plays the “hallmarks o f contemporary, staged oral history” (1993: 98).3 Basing the scripts o f her plays entirely on interview material and performing all the interviewees herself on stage using the latter’s own words, Smith’s project demands, as Charles and James Lyons have claimed, a “new approach to the practices o f both acting and play- writing” (1994: 43). Many commentators have addressed the multiple challenges caused by Smith’s work as an actress and playwright. As Carol Martin claims, “Smith’s apparently hypematuralistic mimesis - in which she replicates not only the words o f different individuals but their bodily style as well - is deceiving” (2002: 334). In their analysis, Charles and James Lyons likewise insist on the “intricately devised organization” o f Smith’s plays (1994: 44).

In the introduction to the play, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992? Smith explains the multiple stages that were necessary to develop her play.

Like a journalist, Smith interviewed more than 200 people - family members, victims, participants, observers, joumalistists, critics - related to a particular historical moment: the civil disturbance which took place in April 1992, commonly known as the Los Angeles riots. Smith’s introduction clearly details the facts:

In the Spring of 1991, Rodney King, a black man, was severely beaten by four white Los Angeles police officers after a high-speed chase in which King was pursued for speeding. A nearby resident videotaped the beating from the balcony of his apartment. When the videotape was broadcast on national television, there was an immediate outcry from the community. The next year, the police officers who beat Rodney King were tried and found not

3 In this regard, also see the influence o f oral history writer Studs Terkel on Anna Deavere Smith, as explained in detail in Naomi Matsuoka’s “Murakami Haruki and Anna Deavere Smith: Truth by Interview.”

4 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was comm issioned by Gorden Davidson, artisitic director o f the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, in May 1992. In this paper, all quotes com e from Twilight Los A ngeles, 1992, published by Anchor Books, and abbreviated as T.

guilty [...] Three days of burning, looting, and killing scarred Los Angeles and captured the attention of the world. (1994: xviii)

From the numerous interwiews recored on tape. Smith selects about 25 (performance script) to 50 “representative” voices (published script). In itself, this process is already problematic as it raises the question as to what is a representative voice. In the New York version directed by George Wolfe, Smith acknowelgdes that they tried to recreate a section o f the play which would be reminiscent o f “a multicultural dream. We looked very hard through all the material to find really positive, good- thinking Asian American, Latino, white, black. And we constructed that” (2001: 251, my emphasis). For other versions however, Smith

“adds or substracts characters to suit the needs o f particular audiences or her own evolving ideas so that each performance is unique and cannot be fully duplicated” (Connor 2001: 181).' The product o f careful selective processes, Twilight clearly constitutes a constructed perfor­

mance piece: from selecting the interviewees, to narrowing the corpus down to representative voices, to editing the published script, Smith’s innovative theatre genre finds itself at the cross-road between journalism, documentary and perform ance.6

As part o f a wider research project, On the Road: A Search fo r A m erica’s Character, Twilight presents the playwright’s “search” and gradual accumulation o f her corpus. As for a documentary, the multiple perspectives offered in the play strongly aim at reinforcing the sense of objectivity. The voices incorporated into the performance are from

The reader is advised to turn to Kimberly Rae Connor’s article “N e­

gotiating the Differences.” In it, Connor compares Smith with a jazz musician who adopts an improvisational style for each performance. Therefore, Connor further notes, Smith’s performances “are, by definition, always works in progress” (2001: 181).

0 In “Improper Conjuctions: Metaphor, Performance and Text,” A lice Rayner analyzes the refusal o f the Pulitzer committee to nominate Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight on basis that the play was not an imaginary world in a fictive text but a docu-drama and/or performance act. Similarly, Twilight raised doubts to cultural critics, who found the piece “too neutral,” lacking “personal and political evaluation o f events in Los A ngeles or the culture at large” (1995:

3). In her article, Rayner complicates conventional oppositions between fiction and reality, text and performance in an attempt to understand these responses.

different ethnic identities - blacks, Latinos, Koreans, whites - from various social positions - including the former president o f Los Angeles Police Commission, a representative o f Coalition against Police Abuse, an actor, an artist, a scholar, a former gang member, as well as from different gender and generations. Smith’s acting method based on her interview technique and her “ability to bring into existence the

‘wondrous’ [...] presence o f performer and performed” (Schechner quoted in Connor 2001: 162) encourage the spectator to witness and engage in a dialogue across difference rather than to choose “sides” or pass blunt judgements.

Besides, Smith’s refusal to enclose her investigations within a coherent explanatory narrative shatters the notion o f absolute truth or authority. Instead, the play offers the “double-voiced-ness” o f Smith both embracing the character’s stories and pointing to the gap between them (Cho 2005: 67). Dorinne Kondo claims that Smith’s acting method challenges the Stanislavsky method - linearity o f objectives, intense scrutiny o f the actor’s and character’s subjectivities, and reinscription o f the interiority o f the psyche. (1994: 96) Approaching

“character from the ‘outside,’” Smith develops it “not from self­

absorption and interioized motivation, but in the attentive reproduction o f gesture, voice, and mannerism” (ib. 96). Similarly, other critics, such as Debby Thompson, argue that Smith’s acting practices relate to a

“post-structuralist model o f racial identity” (2003: 127). In contrast to the preponderant U.S. school o f Naturalistic acting, positing an “inner core, truth, or essence to a character” (ib. 128), Smith approaches racial identity as performative, (ib. 130). From this “other-oriented” approach, Thompson further claims, “the goal o f performance becomes, then, not authenticity but exploitation o f the gap between self and other, actor and character” (ib.). Whether male or female, old or young, black, Korean, Latino, or white, Smith performs all the characters herself. The fact that Smith does portray white people as well as people o f color indeed complicates her performances and allows her to address what Kondo calls “the utopian hopes and tensions animating what might better be charactered as a politics o f afficiliation emblematized in such terms as Latino, Asian American, women o f color, people o f color, queer, and others for which we may not yet have names” (1994: 85).

Smith thereby explodes racial delineation and presents more complicated relationships among people o f color, between social classes, and within ethnic communities.

As Claycomb posits, “docudrama and oral history performance have migrated from film and television to occupy a prominent space on the American stage speaks to a changing perception o f an heightened urgency to rethink conventional notions o f community” (1993:95).

Working in collaboration with several dramaturges from different ethnic backgrounds - Japanese American anthropologist Dorinne Kondo, Guatemalan-American reporter Hector Tobar, African Ameri­

can poet Elizabeth Alexander, among others - Smith’s documentary theater serves as an instrument to help people see beyond fixed and narrow categories. Attacking the black-and-white canvas, Smith strongly criticizes binary simplifications: “We tend to think o f race as us and them - us being black or white depending on one’s own color.

The relationships among peoples o f color and within racial groups are more and more complicated” (Smith 1994: xxi). Smith urges her audience to “reach across ethnic boundaries” in order to comprehend new “multi-faced identities” (ib. xxv). In this sense, Twilight invites us to consider what Dorinne Kondo calls “cross racial identification, alliance, and cleavage, leading us to reconsider the very definitions and formations o f race itse lf’ (Kondo 1994: 83).

In the course o f the play, divided into multiple sections - Prologue, The Territory, Here’s a Nobody, War Zone, Twilight, and Justice - Smith presents characters whose experiences not only challenge race and social delineations, but also demystify the U.S. ethos o f egalita­

rianism and the false promises o f the American dream. So for instance, director Peter Sellars comments on Eugene O ’N eill’s “classic play about the American Dream” (T 200) Long Day ’s Journey into Night.

Sharply criticizing the American dream o f success, Sellars compares the L.A. riots to a burning house where the American family, like the Tyrone’s, is falling apart. Further, the playwright embodies Mrs.

Young-Soon Han, a former liquor store owner, whose disillusionment in the American dream echoes Cullen’s analyzis.7 While Mrs. Han

“believed America is the best” and still “believe[s] it [...] now,” she nevertheless claims that “Korean immigrants were left out” from American society: “What is our right? / Is it because we are Korean? Is it because we have not politicians? / Is it because we don’t/ speak good English? Why?” (T 245). As a matter o f fact, Han’s testimomy deeply

More particularly, see Chapter 4 - King o f America: The Dream o f Equa­

lity (103-131).

resonates with the many minority immigrants who were left out o f the American Dream, whose rights, voices, and experiences remained unheard or forgotten.

In the published script, Smith also includes a phone interview with literary critic Homi K. Bhabha. Bhabha’s postcolonial theories and more particularly its concept o f in-betweenness offer precious insights into the play. As Bhabha repeatedly claims in The Location o f Culture and other writings, one needs to go beyond formulations o f cultural imperialism and simplified binarisms. Bhabha insists on overcoming the exoticism o f cultural diversity in favour o f an empowering hybridity within which cultural difference may operate. (1994: 43-49). In this regard, named after Twilight Bey, an ex-gang member, the play’s title proves deeply symbolic. In-between day and night, the image o f

“twilight” depicts a transitional state. As Bhabha claims: “This twilight moment/ is an in-between moment./ It’s the moment o f dusk./ It’s the moment o f ambivalence/ and ambiguity” (T 232). Symbolically, the

“fuzziness o f twilight/ allows us to see the intersections/ o f the event with a number o f other things that daylight/ obscures for/ us, to use a paradox” (Bhabha 1994: 233). In this sense, Twilight challenges audiences and readers to “interpret more [...] to make ourselves/ part of the act,” to “project” ourselves “onto the event itself,” and “react to it”

(T 233-234). With its “incredible ability to disturb us and inspire us”

(2001: 32), Smith’s theatre becomes in Guinier’s apt formulation a powerful tool “to intervene, to shift not only the way people think about the moment, but potentially to energize them to do something diffe­

rently in that moment” (ib. 33, emphases in original).