Lives Altered Forever

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992

AUTHOR: ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

WHERE: MARK TAPER FORUM, LOS ANGELES

THE BOTTOM LINE: Can a multicultural America really work? A dazzling one-woman show asks some tough questions.

In person Anna Deavere Smith is a tall, slender, gorgeous black woman with an aristocrat's features, a dancer's grace and a Stanford drama professor's vocabulary. Onstage she is a disabled old Korean man, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenage black gang member, a macho Mexican sculptor and 21 other people whose lives were forever changed by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. With a minimum of costumes and props she can make herself tall, short, pudgy, burly. If the person she is enacting speaks Spanish or Korean, so does she. This kind of artful transformation, although essential to the work she does, is the least impressive of her gifts. In her On the Road pieces for regional theaters, in Fires in the Mirror off-Broadway and on PBS, and now in Twilight, she has created a new art form.

The people Smith plays are real and by and large are identified by name. The words they speak are taken verbatim from interviews by Smith herself. Some, like former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, have chosen public lives. Others, like the beating victims Rodney King and Reginald Denny, have had fame thrust upon them. Most live in obscurity. She seeks to convey both the essence of the individuals and the collective character of their place and time. In a century when fiction and journalism have been filching each other's virtues -- the authenticity of truth, the order and purposefulness of storytelling -- Smith has found a technique that does not diminish either. It also serves political aims. "By changing from one person to another, I show that change is possible," she explains. "And the fact that I am a black woman speaking for other ethnicities and for men raises the useful question of who is entitled to speak about what."

Fires in the Mirror portrayed a specific conflict between blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, a sui generis neighborhood of Brooklyn. Twilight, by contrast, is sprawling. It embraces complex social, economic and political issues. It concerns events that involved millions of people and captured attention around the world. It portrays perhaps the most diverse place in America and asks whether such a place -- such a purported model for the national future -- can survive. For every character onstage, Smith debriefed six more who didn't make the cut, including the mayor, Hollywood stars and a U.S. Senator.

Inevitably, there are shortcomings in a two-hour play. While acknowledging Hispanic racial anger, Twilight wrongly implies that rioting and looting were committed almost entirely by blacks. The play depicts a "social explosion" by the law-abiding; in fact, many criminals saw an opportunity and took it. There are sympathetic white characters, but everyone in authority emerges as a reckless boob -- perhaps because Smith enacts with dignity only those she admires. Still, Twilight is dazzling and depressing, rich in details that subtly illuminate the problem of race. Rodney King's angry aunt, recalling happier times, refers to one of her nephew's companions as "that Mexican." His ethnicity reveals nothing of his character. It adds nothing to the story she tells. But she, even she, cannot think of him without it.