Also by Anna Deavere Smith available from Anchor Books
Fires in the Mirror:
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1994
Copyright © 1994 by Anna Deavere Smith
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in 1994.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All rights, including but not limited to live stage performing rights (professional and amateur), motion picture, radio and television broadcasting, recording, recitation, lecturing, public reading, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are expressly reserved to the author and subject to a royalty. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this play by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representatives.
Inquiries concerning rights should be addressed to The Tantleff Office, Inc., 375 Greenwich Street, Suite 700, New York, New York 10013, Attn: Jack Tantleff. (212) 941-3939.
Except where names have been changed to protect anonymity, or as otherwise noted, the text consists of verbatim excerpts from interviews conducted by Anna Deavere Smith.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Anna Deavere.
Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992 : on the road : a search for American character / Anna Deavere Smith,
p. cm.
1. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions—Drama. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Race relations—Drama. 3. Riots—California—Los Angeles—Drama. I. Title.
PS3569. M465T95 1994
812’.54—dc20 93-38298
ISBN 0-385-47375-3
ISBN 0-385-47376-1 (Pbk.)
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91128-0
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
This book is dedicated to the citizens of Los Angeles.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Production History
PROLOGUE
Rudy Salas, Sr.
My Enemy
THE TERRITORY
Stanley K. Sheinbaum
These Curious People
Michael Zinzun
When I Finally Got My Vision/Nightclothes
Jason Sanford
They
Anonymous Young Man
Broad Daylight
Mike Davis
Surfer’s Desert
Theresa Allison
Lightning But No Rain
Cornel West
A Bloodstained Banner
HERE’S A NOBODY
Angela King
Carmen
Sergeant Charles Duke
Where the Water Is
Josie Morales
Indelible Substance
Anonymous Man
Your Heads in Shame
Gil Garcetti
Magic
Stanley K. Sheinbaum
Hammer
WAR ZONE
Chung Lee
Riot
Tom Bradley
Messages
Richard Kim
“Don’t Shoot”
Joe Viola
Butta Boom
Judith Tur
War Zone
Allen Cooper, a.k.a. Big Al
Bubble Gum Machine Man
Reginald Denny
A Weird Common Thread in Our Lives
Captain Lane Haywood
A Badge of Courage
Elvira Evers
To Look Like Girls from Little
Julio Menjivar
National Guard
Katie Miller
That’s Another Story
Anoymous Man #2 (Hollywood Agent)
Godzilla
The Park Family
Walter Park
Kinda Lonely
Chris Oh
To Drive
Mrs. June Park
And in My Heart for Him
Chris Oh
Execution Style
Elaine Young
The Beverly Hills Hotel
Anonymous Young Women
I Was Scared
Maxine Waters
The Unheard
Maxine Waters
Washington
Paul Parker
Trophies
Daryl Gates
It’s Awful Hard to Break Away
Dean Gilmour
Human Remains
TWILIGHT
Peter Sellers
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Rev. Tom Choi
I Remember Going …
Paula Weinstein
A Jungian Collective Unconscious
Bill Bradley
Application of the Laws
Otis Chandler
Something Cooking Here
Owen Smet
A Deadeye
Elaine Brown
Ask Saddam Hussein
Homi Bhabha
Twilight #1
Betye Saar
Magic #2
JUSTICE
Harland W. Braun
Screw Through Your Chest
Mrs. Young-Soon Han
Swallowing the Bitterness
Gladis Sibrian
Lucia
Twilight Bey
Limbo/Twilight #2
Time Line
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Gordon Davidson, George Wolfe, Stanley Sheinbaum, Betty Sheinbaum, Merry Conway.
Stanford University Department of Drama, Michael Ramsaur, Irvine Foundation, Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, Suzanne Sato, Susan Garfield.
Elizabeth Alexander, Theresa Allison, Kathy Cho, Eisa Davis, Thulani Davis, Robert Egan, Oskar Eustis, Jose Manuel Galvan, Roberta Goodman, Kishisha Jefferson, Dorinne Kondo, Kyung-Ja Lee, June K. Lu, Jamie Lyons, Emily Mann, Rosamaria Marquez, Irene Mecchi, Angela Oh, Alice Raynor, Jack Tantleff, Rosemarie Tischler, Hector Tobar, Richard Yarborough, Nancy Yoo, Peter Zeisler.
I also would like to express my deep gratitude to Cecelia Pang for her care and maintenance of the written text in various stages of its development.
Additionally, I am indebted to all of the people who granted me interviews in the course of my research in Los Angeles.
Introduction
In May 1992 I was commissioned by Gordon Davidson, artistic director/producer of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, to create a one-woman performance piece about the civil disturbances in that city in April 1992. For over ten years now I have been creating performances based on actual events in a series I have titled On the Road: A Search for American Character. Each On the Road performance evolves from interviews I conduct with individuals directly or indirectly involved in the event I intend to explore. Basing my scripts entirely on this interview material, I perform the interviewees on stage using their own words. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is the product of my search for the character of Los Angeles in the wake of the initial Rodney King verdict.
In the course of my research for the play I interviewed about two hundred people. Due to time restrictions, however, the number of people I was able to portray on stage was limited to about twenty-five. This book includes some of the material I performed both in the play’s Los Angeles version for the Taper and in the version presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival. It includes additional interviews
that were not included in the stage versions, which I hope will enrich the reader’s understanding of the conflicts that erupted on April 29, 1992. For those who both see the play and read the book, I hope the book can serve as a companion to the theater experience.
The story of how Los Angeles came to experience what some call the worst riots in United States history is by now familiar. 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 King were tried and found not guilty—and the city exploded. The verdict took the city by surprise, from public officials to average citizens. Even the defense lawyers, I was told, anticipated that there would be some convictions. Three days of burning, looting, and killing scarred Los Angeles and captured the attention of the world.
That is the extent of what most Americans understand to have caused what, depending on your point of view, would be variously referred to as a “riot,” an “uprising,” and/or a “rebellion.” But beneath this surface explanation is a sea of associated causes. The worsening California economy and the deterioration of social services and public education in Los Angeles certainly paved the 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. The Watts riots, for example, were sparked by an altercation between a black man and the LAPD. In a speech given at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters spoke vividly about the legacy of the Watts riots:
There was an insurrection in this city before,
and, if I remember correctly,
it was sparked by police brutality.
We had a Kerner Commission report.
It talked about what was wrong with our society.
It talked about institutionalized racism.
It talked about a lack of services,
lack of government responsiveness to the people.
Today,
as we stand here in 1992,
if you go back and read the report,
it seems as though we are talking about what that report cited
some twenty years ago,
still exists today.
The police officers who beat Rodney King were tried in Simi Valley, miles away from the social, economic, and racial problems in Los Angeles. More important, they were miles away from what many residents of the epicenter of the riots, South-Central L.A., would call a war between residents and police officers. When I visited the quiet, predominantly white suburban community of Simi Valley, I began to perceive how profoundly different our experiences of law enforcement can be. For jurors in Simi Valley, Rodney King appeared to be a threat to the police. Moreover, he had been speeding. The officers were, as far as they were concerned, enforcing the law. Police officers reportedly concluded that King was on the drug PCP, impervious to pain, and therefore not responding to the beating. On the other hand, when I interviewed Rodney King’s aunt, she burst into tears as she recounted seeing the beating on television, and “hearing him holler.” She heard King’s cries the first time she saw the tape. Yet a juror in the federal civil rights trial against the officers who also heard King’s reaction to the police blows told me that the rest of the jury had difficulty hearing what she and King’s aunt had heard. But when, during deliberations, they focused on the audio rather than the video image, their perspective changed. The physical image of Rodney King had to be taken away for them to agree that he was in pain and responding to the beating.
Although I did not attend the original trial in Simi Valley, I did attend the subsequent federal civil rights trial. There, I was able to imagine how such a jury could become convinced that, although the beating seemed brutal to any layman, it was, according to the defense, within the guidelines of the LAPD use-of-force policy. Moreover, I came to observe that some people are effected by the power of what District Attorney Gil Garcetti would describe as the “aura” and “magic” of the police, especially when police officers come to court. There they appeared polite, well groomed, and ready to “protect and serve.” This image differed radically from the image of police conveyed to me by Michael Zinzun, a community activist and chairperson of the South-Central-based Coalition Against Police Abuse. The walls of his office were covered with blown-up photographs of people who had been beaten by police—bruised, bloodied, maimed. Zinzun himself had won a case against the city because he had been blinded when he attempted to intervene in a police beating of someone in his community.
The video of the Rodney King beating, which seemed to “tell all,” apparently did not tell enough, and the prosecution lost, as their lead attorney told me, “the slam-dunk case of the century.” The city of Los Angeles lost much more. Twilight is an attempt to explore the shades of that loss. It is not really an attempt to find causes or to show where responsibility was lacking. That would be the task of a commission report. While I was in Los Angeles, and when I have returned since my initial performance of Twilight in the summer of 1993, I have been trying to look at the shifts in attitudes of citizens toward race relations. I have been particularly interested in the opportunity the events in Los Angeles give us to take stock of how the race canvas in America has changed since the Watts riots. Los Angeles shows us that the story of race in America is much larger and more complex than a story of black and white. There are new players in the race drama. Whereas Jewish merchants were hit during the Watts riots, Korean merchants were hit this time. Although the media tended to focus on blacks in South-Central, the Latino population was equally involved. We tend to think of race as us and them—us or them being black or white depending on one’s own color. The relationships among peoples of color and within racial groups are getting more and more complicated.
Where does theater fit into this? Theater can mirror society. But in order to do that theater must embrace diversity. It must include new characters in our human drama that have not been portrayed on our stages. Clearly even white mainstream theater could be more interesting, and more honest, if people of color were integrated into the drama rather than used as walk-on stereotypes. We now have the opportunity to be a part of the discovery of a larger, healthier, more interesting picture of America. I went to Los Angeles as part of this process, to listen to those who had lived through the disturbances and to reiterate their voices in the theater. I have felt in this project, more than once, an increased humility, and a greater understanding of the limitations of theater to reflect society. In developing the On the Road project, it was my goal to develop a kind of theater that could be more sensitive to the events of my own time than traditional theater could. This book is a part of that quest.
The challenge of creating On the Road works is to select the voices that best represent the event I hope to portray. Twilight was a particular challenge in this regard due to the number and the diversity of the voices I had gathered through interviews. I had made decisions as to which interviews to include on my own. However, since Fires in the Mirror, I have found it helpful to include more people in the creative process. I developed Twilight at the Mark Taper Forum in collaboration with four other people of various races who functioned as dramaturges (a dramaturge is a person who assists in the preparation of the text of a play and can offer an outside perspective to those who are more active in the process of staging the play). These dramaturges brought their own real-world experiences with race to bear on the work. They reacted to Twilight at every stage
of its development.
My predominant concern about the creation of Twilight was that my own history, which is a history of race as a black and white struggle, would make the work narrower than it should be. For this reason, I sought out dramaturges who had very developed careers and identities, outside the theater profession. I was interested not only in their ethnic diversity, but in the diversity that they would bring to the project in terms of areas of expertise. I am a strong critic of the insularity of people in theater and of our inability to shake up our traditions, particularly with regard to race and representation issues. An issue that is at the heart of many theater conferences and gatherings is the need to make theater a more responsible partner in the growth of communities.
Among the people I asked to join me were Dorinne Kondo, a Japanese American anthropologist and feminist scholar; Hector Tobar, a Guatemalan-American reporter from the Los Angeles Times who had covered the riots; and the African American poet and University of Chicago professor Elizabeth Alexander. Oskar Eustis, a resident director at the Taper, also joined the dramaturgical team.
After every performance during previews, I met with the dramaturges and with the director and members of the staff of the Taper. Many of the meetings were very emotional. They were dramas in and of themselves. The most outspoken members of the group were Dorinne and Hector. They passionately attacked the black-and-white canvas that most of us in the room were inclined to perpetuate.
After my work at the Taper, and in revising the text for the New York production, I went to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, to work with my acting coach, Merry Conway, who has been working with me at various times during the development of On the Road since its beginnings. The bottom line of my choice in material for a text is what happens when I actually act the material. Merry and I worked on a lot of material that never appeared in the play in any production, but which does appear in this book. What most influences my decisions about what to include is how an interview text works as a physical, audible, performable vehicle. Words are not an end in themselves. They are a means to evoking the character of the person who spoke them. Every person that I include in the book, and who I perform, has a presence that is much more important than the information they give.
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