Gayle Wald

Princeton University
gwald@pucc.princeton.edu

 

The Mark Taper Forum Production of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a work-in-progress that is part of the “On the Road: A Search for American Character” series conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Emily Mann. Set design by Robert Brill. Costume design by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Allen Lee Hughes. Original music by Lucia Hwong.

 

I saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman performance “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” on a cool November evening at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey–more than three thousand miles and worlds away from the site of the first multiracial urban uprising in U.S. history. McCarter was home to the East Coast premiere of Smith’s performance, which had played to near-universal critical acclaim at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and which was directed by McCarter’s Artistic Director, Emily Mann. Though the people in the theater that evening had each paid twenty-five dollars to see “Twilight,” I suspect that many of them had long forgotten (if they had ever acknowledged) the social and economic despair that gave rise to what urban theorist Mike Davis has called “the most violent American civil disturbance since the Irish poor burned Manhattan in 1863.” Indeed, by last November, the trial of the L.A. Four for the near-fatal beating of truck driver Reginald Denny–played in many press accounts as a racial counterbalance to the near-fatal beating of Rodney King–had taken center stage in the white public imagination.

 

When Smith’s performance had ended and the audience had offered its respectful, though not impassioned, applause, a friend of mine overheard a white woman sitting in the row behind us. Turning to her companion, she said in a polite If-you-can’t-say-anything-good-don’t-say-anything-at-all tone of voice, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it entertaining, but…” The woman never completed the sentence, never said what she would have called “Twilight.” Nor did she explain to her companion what she meant by “entertaining,” though clearly the term carried political, as well as aesthetic, value. Her gloss on “Twilight” also contained an unintended irony: Entertainment, or the production of glossy self-representations, is, after all, the dominant business of Los Angeles. In one sense, I could understand how the woman’s expectations could have felt somewhat let down if by “entertaining” she also meant diversionary; though “Twilight” is at times highly amusing, its effect is to memorialize the voices of L.A. In another sense, “entertainment” is one of the many challenges posed by “Twilight,” a work which seeks to generate theatrical compassion through Smith’s hallmark technique of literal impersonation.

 

The mood on Princeton University’s campus was unusually tense the morning after the verdicts were announced in the first trial of police officers Koon, Powell, Wind and Briseno. After a dreary night spent watching CNN’s live aerial television footage of fires that burned through a twenty-five-block area of central L.A., a group of Princeton’s African American and Latino students–joined by some Asian Americans and whites–staged a midday rally in front of Firestone Library (named after the rubber magnate). The students spoke of their rage at the verdicts and at the beating, their sorrow at the loss of life and the damage to neighborhoods, and of their alienation from some of their white friends, many of whom viewed the trial in Simi Valley as an anomalous miscarriage of justice. An Asian-American student implored the assembly to work together to combat racism and discrimination on campus. Some students voiced concern about friends and relatives living in Los Angeles; others spoke of their apprehension about family sixty miles away in New York, where the possibility of rioting still loomed large.

 

Ironically, April 29, 1992 was also the date set for the New York premiere of Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities,” her award-winning one-woman show about the conflict between Hasidic Jews and African- and Caribbean-Americans spurred by the death of a seven-year-old black child, Gavin Cato. (When her opening was canceled, Smith joined demonstrators protesting the King verdict in Times Square.) “Fires,” a play which enacts the relatively clear-cut dispute between visibly distinct minority communities who share the same New York City neighborhood, is the spiritual and aesthetic forebear of “Twilight,” a work which takes on the considerably more complex task of documenting the multiracial, multilingual and geographically dispersed communities of Los Angeles. Both draw upon a rigorous performance technique that Smith has been developing for over a decade, in which she interviews people and then “performs” them verbatim.

 

For Smith, who is also Associate Professor of Drama at Stanford, the performance of real people’s real words originally functioned as a theatrical exercise, a way of investigating how different characters embody or inhabit language differently. Smith used linguistic and performative “found objects”–clips from often baroque late-night talk shows, for example–to investigate the possibility of “entering” character through the meticulous repetition of that character’s language, including body language. In rehearsal for “Twilight,” Smith listened repeatedly to tapes of her interviewees, then practiced until she had incorporated the voices well enough to “wear” the characters’ words. The technique, she contends, entails both theft–the appropriation of others’ voices–and gift–a mode of re-presenting or returning others’ voices to them. (Sister Souljah once refused Smith an interview, claiming that Smith was “the sister who wants to take my words.”) As her work in “Fires” and “Twilight” demonstrates, such impersonation, or “re-iteration,” as Smith prefers to call it, lends itself particularly well to highly charged media spectacles such as the Crown Heights conflict and the L.A. uprisings, precisely because these are wars of image and voice. A crucial part of the public spectacle that was “L.A.” entailed the struggle of voices speaking on behalf of besieged communities to broadcast their beliefs over the steady din of talking heads reporting official estimates of property damage. In newspaper and television accounts, the rioting itself was often portrayed as what happens when words do not suffice.

 

For the Mark Taper Forum production of “Twilight,” Smith interviewed more than 175 people, including movie stars (Angelica Houston) and politicians (Maxine Waters). With help from four dramaturges–one black, one Latino, one white and one Asian–she later selected twenty-odd characters to be included in the work. Smith’s performances are, by definition, always works-in-progress, since she adds or subtracts characters to suit the needs of particular audiences or her own evolving ideas. The twenty-one people that she performed at McCarter ranged from the well known (Reginald Denny and former L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates) to the lesser known (Angela King, Rodney’s aunt, and Maria, Juror #7 in the federal King trial, whose character was added two weeks into the L.A. performance of “Twilight”). John Lahr’s review of “Twilight” in The New Yorker describes a performance in which Smith did her show for seven hundred L.A. high school students. In the middle of performing Julio Menjivar–a lumber salesman and driver who was arrested for no apparent reason as part of the police round-ups during the riots–Smith interrupted her description (in Spanish) of the police abuse. “I don’t think I should say what the police said,” she told the audience. “Your teachers will mind.” When the kids shouted back their encouragement, Smith continued: “Get up, motherfucker! Get up!”

 

On stage Smith, a light-skinned African American woman, performs barefoot, wearing a plain white shirt and loose, dark pants; in addition to changes in voice, posture and affect, she signifies the “feel” of characters with simple costume changes: a hat taken on or off, the addition of earrings or a string of pearls, a cigarette hanging loosely from the side of the mouth, a man’s striped tie and blazer. Brief blackouts demarcate the shifts between characters, shifts which are left intentionally ragged so that Smith’s audience can witness the uneven process of metamorphosis between, for example, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, a Korean-American and former owner of a liquor store, and Twilight Bey, a young African American male and an organizer of the gang truce between the Cripps and the Bloods.

 

Bey’s self-consciously oracular voice, distinct from the bureaucratese of some characters and the informal, conversational expression of others, literally has the last word in “Twilight.” Bey steals the show, but not in the conventional sense; though his is not the most arresting or profound voice of the performance, it is the one that lends “Twilight” its title and serves as its coda, a surrogate voice for Smith’s voice. In a brief essay about the development of “Twilight,” Smith explains that she was inspired both by Bey’s words and by the rich metaphorical potential of his name. Twilight is a time of danger, when objects ordinarily visible in broad daylight are obscured, and the time of day when much of the first rioting occurred. Twilight is also a time of liminality and, more importantly, creativity–a time, Smith writes, that “asks more of our vision.” Here are Bey’s words, spoken by and through Smith, as he analyzes the relation between “twilight” and the growth of a prophetic voice:

 

  
               So twilight
               is
               that time
               between night and day
               limbo
               I call it limbo
               so a lot of times when I've brought up
                    ideas to my homeboys
               they say
               Twilight
               that's before your time
               that's something you can't do now
               when I talked about the truce back in
                    1988
               that was something they considered
                    before its time
               yet
               in 1992
               we made it
               realistic
               so to me it's like I'm stuck in limbo
               like the sun between night and day

 

Shaman, prophet and intermediary (in the gang wars), ever attentive to the disruptive power of his language, Bey’s character is a stand-in for Smith’s own (absent) voice as performer. Watching her perform each of the twenty-one characters in “Twilight” with obvious care and generosity — even a bewildered Daryl Gates, who seems genuinely mystified at how he became a national symbol of police oppression following “the Rodney thing” (a telling slip)– I had the sense that Smith, too, wants to be a peacemaker of sorts, a multilingual interlocutor who constructs her own unique theatrical voice from the select fragments of others’ voices. Bey’s is the privileged voice of “Twilight” because, in his role as leader of the gang truce, he exemplifies an analogous spirit of Smith’s performance, which is communication across seemingly insurmountable lines of hierarchy and difference.

 

Through Smith, who embodies in her performance the very tape recorder that she uses to conduct interviews, “Twilight” brings to audiences such as the one in Princeton voices that would not normally get a public hearing. People from South L.A. and Koreatown are magically transported to a stage in New Jersey–not through conventional media such as TV, but through “real” physical proximity and presence. With the effect of a verbal patchwork quilt, the pieces sewn together by her own constant bodily presence, Smith’s performance constructs an imaginary–and highly intimate –conversation among twenty-one people who will never share the same room together, then presents this conversation to an audience that has paid twenty-five dollars a piece to listen. In contrast to the “outside” social realities that furnish white voices their immediacy and authority, the defining power of the soundbite, in the safe space of the theater, Smith gives all the voices in “Twilight” equal representation. Everyone has his or her five minutes before the footlights, from the director of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front to the Korean storeowner whose brain was partially blown out by a stray bullet.

 

Moreover, the voices Smith performs are not homogenized through journalistic “smoothing out” (a technique applied liberally to the frequent slips of tongue and verbal lapses committed by heads of state, for example); neither are they necessarily translated for their audience. In one remarkable sequence, Smith performs Chung Lee, president of the Korean America Victim’s Association, speaking in Korean as English subtitles are projected on screens at either side of the theater. While selecting performance material from the archives of her interviews, Smith says she generally looks for the “bumps” in the flow of a speaker’s words and phrases. Her interests lie, paradoxically, in the moments when language “fails” rather than when it succeeds too well, when she believes it speaks us most thoroughly. Her monologues communicate as often through stammering and hesitation, when speakers are tongue-tied, as through moments of linguistic and tonal clarity. Like the woman overheard by my friend during the Princeton performance of “Twilight,” Smith’s characters speak through ellipses, innuendo, intonation and accent.

 

“Twilight” harbors an implicitly populist agenda of breaking down the conventional binary between the “high” — and obviously highly stylized–language of the stage and the “low,” and no less stylized, language of everyday speech. Smith does not construct a multicultural national literature merely by introducing “real” voices into a highly charged aesthetic arena (though in and of itself, this would perhaps constitute a progressive political act); rather, she subtly shifts the contours of this arena by finding the “poetry,” as she calls it, in ordinary language. “Everyone, in a given amount of time, will say something that is like poetry,” Smith writes in the introduction to the recently published book version of Fires in the Mirror. “The process of getting to that poetic moment is where character lives” (xxxi). Later in the same essay, she notes that “character” lives in the digressions, the ways (of universally “bad” grammar, of “ums” and “uhs”) through which we get to the “point.” By mimetically reproducing the details of various characters’ fissures in speech, Smith makes it possible for people to talk–not only to say the sorts of things that are sometimes forbidden or veiled in public discourse, but also to say things in ways that are not usually allowed in the theater.

 

Yet it’s at the precarious line between mimicry and parody that Smith’s work potentially backfires, or at least loses its political potency. While parody promises pleasure for its audience, mimicry seems the more difficult–and possibly the more radical–of the two modes. Closely related to parody, satire depends upon a cultural community that speaks, to a greater or lesser degree, a common language. Mimicry, in contrast, requires that the subject “become” the object of her imitation. Unlike parody, which effects a distance from the thing being mocked in order to provoke a self-conscious laughter, mimicry diminishes critical detachment and compels one to a more direct — though not necessarily less discriminating–engagement with the “other.” Smith sees mimicry as a way of facilitating a radical empathy, of enabling a transformative slippage across socially produced identities of race, nation, gender, and class. “The spirit of acting,” she writes, “is the travel from the self to the other” (xxxvi).

 

Perfect mimicry of the other is, of course, a utopian desire, an impossible fantasy exemplified by Madonna, who in “Vogue” sings that it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, a boy or a girl. As Homi Bhabha has written in the context of colonial subjects, the very precondition for mimicry is the residue of difference–the “almost the same, but not quite“–that distinguishes self from other. Mimicry has the potential to de-naturalize dominant voices, as when Smith’s performances (of an anonymous talent agent, the former president of the L.A. Police Commission, the legal counsel for Officer Briseno, or even Reginald Denny) dramatize, and thus unmask, the privilege of white speakers. The implicit challenge of Smith’s performance style lies in inhabiting these kinds of voices while keeping mimicry and parody in tension. Of the characters she performs, Smith writes: “I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness” (xxxviii).

 

It might seem strange, therefore, that “Anna Deavere Smith” is absent from “Twilight.” Or rather, she’s everywhere present, in the form of a desire which is the structuring absence of the performance. Moments in the performance when characters call attention to Smith’s (invisible) presence are disruptive in this regard, making explicit the ways in which “Smith” mediates our experience of them, as well as the ways in which their own self-representations are shaped by her presence. Elvira Evers, a Panamanian-American cashier whose life was saved when a stray bullet penetrated her back and lodged in the elbow of her unborn baby, speaks to an invisible Smith, asking her midway through the monologue whether it’s alright to bring out her little girl. It’s a crucial moment, not just for transforming monologue into dialogue, but for foregrounding the ways in which Smith’s own voice may have a legitimizing, or hindering, effect upon others’ expression.

 

Ever since “Fires in the Mirror” catapulted her to the pages of People magazine and the couch on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show, Smith’s work has been almost universally acclaimed. (According to one account, now that Smith has become a commodity in her own right, she signs a waiver that guarantees that after a certain threshold she will share profits with her interviewees.) The obvious political merit of “Twilight”–appreciated equally by critics from both the “mainstream” and “alternative” presses –lies in its portrayal of the irreducibility of voices in the noisy public discourse of “L.A.” Whereas the television news pitted riotous “black rage” against indignant white propriety, or black rage against Korean-American cupidity (the role formerly assigned Jewish inner-city merchants), or black rage against Korean-American industriousness (the divisive “model minority” image), “Twilight” offers a more complex rendering. As Gloria Naylor writes in Mama Day, there’s not just two sides to the story in L.A.–my side and your side–but four sides, including “an outside, and an inside. All of it is truth” (230).

 

“Twilight” is a great leveler, a fact which may be simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While Smith aspires to burst through the limitations of a narrow ethnocentrism, the democratic impulse that guides “Twilight” can tend to obscure the ways in which these voices are in violent struggle with one another. Like all of us, Smith herself is part of this process. When the Mark Taper Forum originally commissioned her to create “Twilight,” some local artists protested that the theater was importing a commercially and critically successful “outsider” to speak their voices. Crusades for cultural justice are often figured in such terms, as conflicts over the ownership of voices and representations. This is not to impugn Smith’s voice; indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of “Twilight” is Smith herself–in particular, the obvious respect and care she demonstrates for the voices entrusted to her. At its best, however, “Twilight” embodies a dialectic: not only does Smith speak for and as “others”; these others also infuse and speak for her.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133.
• Lahr, John. “Under the Skin.” The New Yorker 69, 19 (June 28, 1993): 90-94.
• Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1988.
• Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.