Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You. An Interview

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 1993 papers

Abstract

Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities is a series of portraits of people enmeshed in the Crown Heights riots where Jews and blacks were so violently pitted against one another, in Brooklyn, August 1991. The riots were provoked when Gavin Cato, a black child, was hit and killed by a Lubavitch rebbe's motorcade. By the end of that day Yankel Rosenbaum, a young Jewish scholar from Australia, was murdered in retaliation. The piece was first performed at the Public Theatre in the late spring and summer of 1992, with Christopher Ashley as director. Fires in the Mirror was then mediated for television broadcast by PBS's American Playhouse, directed by George C. Wolfe. The TV adaptation first aired in April 1993. In the stage version Smith performed barefoot in a white shirt and black pants. Sitting in an armchair, or at a desk, donning a yarmulke, or a cap of African Kente cloth, or a spangled sweater,. Smith brought her 29 subjects to the stage to speak their own lines. That there were unresolvable contradictions in the multiple versions of truth Smith portrayed did not diminish the conviction of each character that what they said was true. Smith's apparently hypematuralistic mimesis-in which she replicates not only the words of different individuals but their bodily style as well-is deceiving. Derived from a method more documentary than artistic in the usual sense, Smith's performance can easily be understood as a feat of technical virtuosity. Brilliantly portrayed characters, however, are not enough to generate the enormous critical success of a work about a very turbulent set of events. The authority of one group over another, of one individual over others, is undermined by the presence of Smith as the person through whom so many voices travel. Smith gives these people the chance to speak as if to each other-in much the same way a spirit doctor brings ancestors or other spirits in contact with the living-in the presence of the community of the audience. It is this fictional and yet actual convergence of presences that gives Smith's work its power. Angela Davis, Nzotake Shange, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Rabbi Shea Hecht, Reverend Al Sharpton, and others, known and unknown, speak together. They speak together across race, history, theory, and differences in their own words through

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