Over 30 years after the Los Angeles uprising following the Rodney King verdict, Anna Deavere Smith has reimagined her once one-woman, now ensemble play, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.” The show explores the five days following the Rodney King verdict and how the uprising affected Angelenos.
But police violence against Black men hasn’t gone away in the ensuing years, which is partly why Smith felt the need to expand and revisit her play.
“I got in touch with the director and one of the producers, Tyrone, when Tyree Nichols was killed. And I said, ‘Are you watching this?!’ and Tyrone wrote back, ‘Looks like your play just cannot become a historical drama,’” Smith shares. “It was produced in New York at the Signature Theatre two years ago. And it kept getting delayed. It was like a year late because of the murder of George Floyd. And so the ‘why now?’ is that the now is the now. It just keeps happening.”
The timing also coincides with the 30-year anniversary of the play’s first staging at The Mark Taper Forum. But this time around, Smith has reconceived it, adding five additional actors.
“The stories are more than Black and white. They're so complicated because they're about humans and how humans respond to catastrophe,” Anna Deavere Smith says of her body of work. Courtesy of Center Theater Group.
When researching the play after the uprising, Smith says she spoke to 320 people of varying backgrounds. “I wouldn't say that this play was written through the lens of the Black community because I also interviewed people in the Latinx community, and also many people in the Asian American community,” She shares. “This was the first time that I was really able to see race in a more complex way than just Black and white.”
However, many people have wrestled with language surrounding the events — “uprising” being the term most media outlets believe is appropriate to use. Smith has also struggled with it.
“When I came here to LA, I couldn't just sit down with my tape recorder and say, ‘Well, tell me what you saw during the riots.’ Because there were people who thought it was a revolution, and people who thought it was an uprising. And my favorite were the politicians who referred to it as ‘the events in Los Angeles.’ One woman used the term that I didn't hear very much, which was the ‘social explosion.’ And it was an uprising, it was an explosion. That's how I witnessed it.”
“This was the first time that I was really able to see race in a more complex way than just Black and white,” says playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Courtesy of Center Theatre Group.
Inhabiting characters who are experiencing such trauma, as Smith does in much of her work overall, isn’t always easy. “I feel it’s my purpose to carry the stories,” She says. “I think that it should weigh … and I hold it with great respect for the people who have been broken by these things.”
One of the people she interviewed for “Twilight” was Reginald Denny, who was dragged from his truck on Florence and Normandie on live television. “Four different Black people who didn't know each other ran out of their houses and got him to the hospital driving his truck, not even able to see because the windshield was so broken. One person standing on the running board telling the other person where to drive. And a woman who was on her knees holding him in her arms. She said she saw it on TV. And she thought ‘I am a Christian, I have to go outside and I have to help him.’ So it's always that these stories are more than Black and white. They're so complicated because they're about humans and how humans respond to catastrophe.”