Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. - book reviews

African American Review, Summer, 1997 by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory

Anna Deavere Smith. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1994. 265 pp. $21.95.

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry, with A Raisin in the Sun, revolutionized the American theater when she created an African intellectual the likes of which had never been fathomed on the commercial stage. Seventeen years after the run of Raisin on Broadway, ntozake shange, with her for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, reshaped the American stage with her dynamic choreopoem; shange carved a place on the commercial stage for her poetry which spoke to women across ethnic boundaries. Like Hansberry and shange, Anna Deavere Smith has added significantly to the development of American theater with her stunning work of documentary theater. Twilight was first staged for the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and later presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Anna Deavere Smith's documentary theater helped earn for her a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, an award which followed on the heels of her winning an Obie Award and becoming a Pulitzer Prize runner-up in 1992 for Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities.

Twilight enlarges and redefines the American theater experience in this unique first-person portrait of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Smith's documentary theater is a verbatim account of the people who experienced the riots. In preparation for scripting her one-woman show, Smith interviewed some 200 people whose lives had been affected by the riots, and from these interviews she selected for portrayal in the published version approximately forty-five distinctively drawn voices, including those of a disabled Korean, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenaged black gang member, a macho Mexican-American artist, Rodney King's aunt, beaten truck driver Reginald Denny, former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, and a host of other victims and witnesses.

Smith never allows the readers to forget that she is portraying real lives, that the language and spirit belong to those who witnessed the flames in Los Angeles when the Rodney King verdict was announced. Twilight provides an insightful look at the social and political issues that undergirded the 1992 riot. Smith's play, which is rich in detail about people who struggle with the violence of the streets and the apathy and unfairness of the judicial system, destroys any notion that inaction will resolve the economically linked racial tensions found in Los Angeles and across the United States.

Twilight is a brilliant theater piece which illuminates the devastating effects of race and class biases. Smith's own assessment of the causes of the riot is an important statement in the introduction to the play:

The worsening California economy and the deterioration of social services

and public education in Los Angeles certainly paved a way to unrest. In

1968, President Lyndon Johnson convened the Kerner Commission to examine

the causes of riots that shook more than 150 American cities in 1967.

The commission's report highlighted urban ills and the plight of the urban

poor. Yet more than twenty years later, living conditions for blacks and

Latinos in Los Angeles have hardly improved, and Rodney King's beating was

only the most visible example of years of police brutality toward people

of color.

Smith's account in the introduction to the play of her journey from the streets to the stage and her razor-sharp play script with photos of the author in character combine to make Twilight a major contribution to American theater. The language is captivating and the powerful portrayals of victims, witnesses, and participants in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 make this play an unforgettable American tragedy.