The New Yorker Radio Hour - Anna Deavere Smith Retells Rodney King’s Story in Theatre

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” premièred nearly thirty years ago, but it’s one of the most current and important plays on Broadway right now. Anna Deavere Smith pioneered a form now known as verbatim theatre: instead of creating characters and writing dialogue, she would interview dozens or hundreds of people about an event, and weave a story from those real characters and their words. “Twilight” is about the deadly violence and unrest that erupted after police officers were acquitted of the ferocious beating of Rodney King—one of the first episodes of police brutality caught on videotape and broadcast to the nation. Her form, she tells David Remnick, let her complicate the racial dynamics of Black and white people, to include the voices of Asian Americans and Latinx people involved in the uprising. Deavere talks about how the play reads now, after George Floyd’s murder and the uprising that followed, and about what still hasn’t changed in the cultural climate for Black theatre artists. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the most thrilling and disturbing shows in New York right now is a play by Anna Devere Smith called Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992. It's about the violence and unrest that erupted after the Rodney King verdict nearly 30 years ago when police officers who had nearly beaten him to death, were acquitted. That act of violence was one of the first examples of police brutality caught on video. Everyone saw it, and it couldn't be unseen. And in the wake of last year's George Floyd uprising, Twilight has taken on an even deeper resonance in meaning in American life. When Twilight premiered on Broadway in 1994, it represented something of a revolution in American theater. Anna DeVier-Smith talked to more than 300 people in Los Angeles, people of different races and different perspectives.

They discussed everything. They discussed race, the Rodney King beating, and the details of their own lives. That was the mood at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Safety in numbers. It's like a fortress. And we were just like, here we are, and we're still alive, and we hope that people will be alive when we come out. If white folks were to experience black sadness, it would be too overwhelming

very few whites could take seriously black sadness and still live the lives that they live in. Smith relied on those transcripts as the foundation of her work and hers was a truly novel approach and it now goes by the name

of verbatim theater. Nighttime to me is like a lack of I don't affiliate darkness with anything negative. I affiliate darkness with what was first because it was first. And then relative to my complexion, I am a dark individual. And with me stuck in Limbaugh, it's like, I see the darkness as myself. And I see the light as the knowledge and the wisdom of the world and understanding of us. I spoke with Anna DeVier Smith just after the revival open.

Anna, I first of all, first of all, all, I thought the production was extraordinary. Extraordinary. Thank you. Thank you so much. I have to say, it was the first time I've been in a theater in so long. Just the act of settling into a seat, mask on, excited to see something that I know is going to be great. It was thrilling. Well, that's, yeah, I guess for me, I've been sitting in that theater at previews and stuff. So I don't even think in the first preview, I had that particular sensation, which is a great sensation that a lot of people are having with just being back. So Anna, let's start at the beginning. This play takes us back to 9192 when the LAPD officers beat up Rodney King within an inch of his life and they were finally acquitted. Tell me about your

decision to go forward and make theater of this coming out of a play that you had written about the racial strife in Brooklyn in Crown Heights. They sound like on the face of it, they sound like projects that are quite similar in intent. Yeah. Well, in a way, I don't know if they are similar in intent, but they're very connected because I was in, at the public theater, working on Fires of the Mirror.

In fact, I was in my, I think, dress rehearsal or something like that. And I got back to my apartment in New York. And when I got home, like my answering machine, remember answering machines? I was like glinking away. And friends of mine in L.A. were like, you've got to turn on your television. We know you've been in tech and you probably don't know about this.

It's awful. And just, you know, all of those images of everything in flames. And in fact, the first preview was canceled because I'm sure you were in New York. Then the city kind of shut down. out of fear that there would also be an unrest here in New York. So, you know, I went about my business playing that play, Fires in the Mirror, and I really think that one reason it was so popular, and it was kind of my breakout thing for my career,

was that less about people's feelings about Brooklyn, but people were coming to the theater, like with this sense of just unrest about what had happened in L.A. how could this happen kind of thing. And so, you know, I went on, left New York, kept running fires in the mirror all summer, and went to California where I lived in September. I was at Stanford. Actually, that was the year I was coming up for tenure.

And every weekend, I would go down to L.A. and just interview up a storm. Well, and how did you invent your form? Where did it come from? In other words, the Crown Heights, piece and then the Los Angeles piece are the result of many, many, many dozens, even hundreds of interviews that you would

conduct, transcribe, and then use verbatim. Where does that come from that technique? It all started, you know, I don't want to go too far back, but it really started with Shakespeare, with me being more interested in the sort of uncanny thing that could happen to us when I was in the conservatory. when we really just said the words in Shakespeare as compared to what's called the method or psychological realism

where you should dig deep and find these feelings within yourself and that idea that every single character in the world lives inside of you. You know, they'd say there's a Hamlet in you. You don't have to reach for Hamlet. He's there and you. And I just thought that was a kind of spiritual dead end. And I, for some reason, being a person who hadn't even intended to be an actor, I wasn't very educated in that way. But I just was looking for another way to think about the craft of acting. What struck me so powerfully, and there were many things about the play the other night and seeing previous work of yours, is that everybody gets heard and listened to uniquely. And somebody that might seem to be in the beginning a source of mockery or parody

suddenly becomes deeper with time as we listen more and they're given more sympathy and then the reverse can happen. Somebody who seems to be right on the nose and filled with righteousness, you're not averse to maybe letting a little air out of the balloon there.

You're seeing people and trying to make them complex in a very short period of time while they have their say at the lip of the stage in a way. Well, I mean, I think that's the power of spoken words spoken. while people are trying to make sense out of something that doesn't make sense, that has gone awry. And sometimes their own dignity has been disrupted and they want to restore that. But they're really trying to make order out of disorder, whether that's emotional,

whether it's just the catastrophe that they saw or catastrophe that happened to them. And also, very importantly, in the case of Twilight, I had an opportunity to, to make the race story, which had been at that time, pretty much told, even in talking about the Los Angeles riots as a story about black and white people. And going to L.A. was an opportunity to complicate that because of the fact that Korean businesses were hit, the fact that the riot that started as a social justice riot also became a Latinx poverty riot. I had a chance to make a more complicate, the story of race more complex.

I'm talking with Anna Devere Smith about her play, Twilight, Los Angeles 1992. More to come. Obviously, that's one of the challenges and one of the sources of power for the production that I was lucky enough to see the other night is the

time that's elapsed between the beating of Rodney King and the period of Black Lives Matter and the murder, the torture, the torture, and murder of George Floyd. How were you thinking about how George Floyd and last summer would inform the way you would present a play that's now 30 years in the past when it was first written?

Well, I think, you know, first of all, just that it would be more immediate for people. Although I think that these matters, like the story of police violence against citizens is very fresh in our minds before George Floyd. You know, people would mark it beginning with Trayvon Martin and the beginning of the importance and popularity of the presence of Black Lives Matter. I do think that even if we had not had the explosion in the country after the murder of Floyd, people would still be coming to the. the theater with a sense of this question of what are we going to do about the police, you know? The Floyd murder opened a window, as you will know, which creates opportunity for many things, a reassessment of how we are, a reassessment of who has power,

a reassessment of what we can and can't do and what we want to do and not do. So I think people probably come to the audience in a way that's raw, more raw perhaps, if we hadn't had to have this very tragic death of George Floyd. I wonder if you, I'm sure you think about this, and I know I think about it in what I do, is that I'm concerned sometimes, and maybe you are too, that you're reaching the like-minded. Yeah.

I don't mean preaching to the converted. It's not as simple as that, but I don't know very often whether, What the New Yorker is presenting, what public radio is presenting, what you're presenting is reaching the other-minded. And because you don't want to just galvanize the like-minded, you also want to engage people with whom you're in profound disagreement, to say the least. Do you feel that that can happen with what you're doing? I think it can. I think that it is very hard. I think that it is very hard time to do that, as you know. I mean, part of one of the hardest times to do it. Because people have so many

things they can do. That's number one. They have so many ways that they can spend their time and more power to them. So, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a preacher. But yeah, I think, I think, I don't mind preaching to the choir because I think we need choir rehearsal. That's number one. Interesting. And I do think that there are ways. to go further. What do you mean by choir rehearsal, Anna? Well, I mean, I think the people who come to the theater who, first of all, I don't think the people in the theater agree

are all on the same spectrum. We think they may be tending to be more liberal. But, you know, for example, The Notes from the Field, in Cambridge is the American Repertory Theater, and in Berkeley, we stopped the show in the middle and sent people the whole audience, every single night, 500 people out into groups of 20 to talk about with facilitators,

you know, about the school to prison pipeline. People didn't agree. Believe me, they didn't agree. So much so that each time the facilitators themselves had to be taken care of because of the sort of storm of different feelings. So number one, we can do projects like that, right, which reveal what, you know, like disrupting passive observance, in this case, having people who don't know each other, speaking in small groups that way. So we learn more about who we are and what we are.

So that's what I mean by there's a lot of it. experimentation we can do. The other thing is, you know, I try to interview people who have very different opinions than myself. So let's say if I were to make a show about America right now, right? I would work with foundations to be able to build that show in a way that I weren't just thinking about who am I interviewing Republicans and, you know, Democrats or completely disengaged people, but I would be planning for ways in communities to have people in the theater together. We need to be as creative about our audiences and about our sense of public as we are about what we put in our work. And we need to think about the people who come to engage with us in the arts or in culture in general

in a way that's not just about are they buying a ticket. They have something else that's very, very, very important to offer us. right now. We talked about what may or may not have changed politically since the first time this play saw a stage and now. What's changed in the theater? Do you feel less lonely in the theater as a black woman, as a playwright, as an actor, which you've also been, then you might have been 30 years ago.

Has much changed? You know, that's a very difficult question to answer. because, first of all, right now, as you know, the theater and other arts institutions are under great scrutiny by younger artists, by artists of color. And there's much that needs to be fixed. And that's one of the things that fixing, the critique, became very loud after Floyd was killed. I wish that more had happened, but I can't say that I walk freely in the American theater and feel that there is not racism.

It would be a lie. I mean, and I feel for arts institutions and for universities to continue to claim their spaces as humanizing spaces in large part to raise money, they really need to make some revisions and they really need to think about it. And I feel, again, it's a great thing about being a teacher. You know, my students will be much more assertive than I ever would have been. I tried to play nice.

I wrote something for the Atlantic this year called The Last of the Nice Negro Girls. You know, I was a nice Negro girl. And when I went to college and then when I hit the theater, everything was written by white men, and I kind of had to smile my way into my position. And like all artists, you know, you stop smiling when you're fighting for what you think creatively is right. But, you know, I'm a hopaholic, and I really believe in these institutions and in their importance as humanizing forces. But I can't say that I feel like I belong any more than I did in the beginning.

I'm happy that my work has been appreciated, but, you know, like those old-fashioned people who say, I can't really rest until, until, until, until. Anna DeVier-Smith, thank you so much. The play is Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992. Thank you. Thank you. Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992,

is now the signature theater in New York City. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining me. See you next time. New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon and Corby, Calalia, David Krasnau, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino.

With additional help from Priscilla Al-A-Bee this week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part. by the Cherina Endowment Fund.