In Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines, published in 2000, Anna Deavere Smith discusses the art of listening, still a much-abused art these days. Along the way, she tacitly explains why she deserves to be ranked among the best listeners of our day, possibly of many days.
Theatergoers already knew as much, of course. Those who’d witnessed Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the theater pieces that had already established Smith as, if not the inventor of the stage documentary, certainly its foremost practitioner. And not only as a compiler but as an actor. Playing all parts, she accomplished something truly stellar.
In this season of verbatim stage accounts—Is This a Room and Dana H., the others—Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is back in a somewhat revised version. For the revival, directed with authority by Taibi Magar, Smith has withheld her acting services and substituted a five-member cast—Elena Hurst, Wesley T. Jones, Francis Jue, Karl Kenzler, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart—to speak all or parts of the interviews she selected from the approximately 320 interviews she held then.
What was the event? For those who don’t know or have forgotten, it’s the 1991 Rodney King beating by four members of the Los Angeles police force, the responsible officers tried and acquitted on April 29, 1992. It’s the beating that was Sony-videoed by a shocked witness and is no less devastating now, as shown here by projectionist David Bengali.
Although Smith devotes much of her interviewing to the King episode—the first speaker is King’s aunt Angela, reminiscing on her nephew’s early fishing days—Smith widens her coverage of the King incident to other views on the racism ferociously attacking the nation then. Not least of the horrors explored is the assault on Reginald Denny, a truck driver, by Black men.
Roaming far afield for interviewees, Smith gets around to actor Charlton Heston in his NRA capacity and to opera singer Jessye Norman, who expatiates somewhat vaguely on her view of things. More cogently, she finds her way to a few prominent names much more involved in the reactions, among them the always outspoken Congresswoman Maxine Waters; Stanley K. Sheinbaum, former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission; and Hector Tobar, a former Los Angeles reporter.
Following each other in Linda Cho’s deftly selected costumes onto Riccardo Hernandez’s platform playing area, the actors individually and collectively bring stinging life to all those represented These include a few witnesses to the King murder, a community activist, a fulminating Hollywood talent agent. an Asian man despairing on his unacknowledged dilemmas—and seemingly no end of other participants who divulge views ranging from harrowing to unenlightening. Smith also shapes “A Dinner Party That Never Happened.” The locale is Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse with Waters herself and four other attendees (New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, among them) voicing their takes on various alienating situations.
Perhaps Smith’s most remarkable achievement is her refusal to editorialize. She simply presents the facts and opinions as told by others. Her panoramic coverage is set forth so that audience members may make of it what they will.
Bringing the report up to 2021 date, Smith once again taped journalist Tobar on his retrospective assessment. He delivers it, but with a disturbing thought persisting. For this revival Smith may have shaped her work as a play for our time, a play germane to our post-George Floyd/Black Lives Matter ]present. Yet considering the little headway made in race relations up to this very minute, how many years to come will Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 stubbornly remain as a play not only for our time but as a play for any future United States time? The prospect is chilling.
Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 opened November 1, 2021, at Signature Center and runs through November 21. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
