Engage with Stage: Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

DEAR SUBSCRIBERS, I sincerely hope you enjoyed Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and the terrific performance by Patrese D. McClain. If you haven’t seen it yet, I think you will find it quite engaging and most relevant. I thought for this iteration of your special Engage with Stage content, it might be fun to share some of the information I came across while researching material for the dramaturgical pages of the program. There is always more material than we include.

So just for you, I have written an article about creating Twilight that I hope offers a glimpse into Anna Deavere Smith’s process while working on the original production and her hopes for what she believes as a piece of theatre Twilight may achieve. Also, I was fascinated to learn what became of the video camera George Holliday used to record the assault on Rodney King. There’s a short piece about that, as well.

On behalf of all of us at Syracuse Stage, I want to thank you for subscribing to this unusual season. As you know, at heart theatre is about community and collaboration, both of which we have been alienated from for far too long and sadly will be for a while still. Knowing that we have your support and your keen interest in the work we are doing and will do again is deeply reassuring and truly inspiring. Even when we cannot set foot on either side of the footlights, we need an audience. Thank you for being here with us.

Stay safe and warm, Joe Whelan Director of Marketing and Communications

T WI LI GHT: LO S ANG E L E S, 19 9 2

CREATING TWILIGHT The following is a form of documentary theatre about the Los Angeles riots of 1992. This play is about a real event, using the words of real people. The play is based on interviews conducted by Anna Deavere Smith soon after the race riots in Los Angeles of 1992. All words were spoken by real people and are verbatim from those interviews.

This production note came from director Steve H. Broadnax III and was include at the beginning of the Twilight video to help orient viewers to what they were about to see. In creating Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992— and before that Fires in the Mirror, a piece about tension and violence between Black and Jewish communities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in the summer of 1991—Anna Deavere Smith forged her own sub-genre of documentary theatre, called Verbatim Theatre. The process was the same for both shows: conduct multiple interviews to accumulate a kaleidoscope of perspectives, use the words of those interviews unchanged to create a series of monologues, then call on her extraordinary skill as an actor to transform those real people into the characters of her play. It was work that demanded she be an intelligent and sensitive journalist, a ruthless and exacting editor, and an effortless chameleon-like performer.

For Fires in the Mirror, Smith conducted more than 50 interviews; for Twilight, more than 320. Of those, like a miner panning for gold, she sifted out 37 for the show.

Smith grew up on the East Coast, in Baltimore. Consequently, as she began her work on Twilight, she felt it would be advantageous to get help with understanding

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the social and racial dynamics of Los Angeles, which was far less Black and white and much more diverse with large Mexican and Asian communities. She enlisted the aid of four dramaturgs who became active, even volatile, creative partners: Dorinne Kondo, Hector Tobar, Elizabeth Alexander, and Oscar Eustis, all formidable and accomplished.

Eustis of course is now the artistic director of New York’s Public Theater. Alexander is a poet and essayist who taught at Yale for many years and is now president of the Mellon Foundation.

Tobar is a novelist and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and Kondo is anthropologist and feminist scholar.

“It was work that demanded she be an intelligent and sensitive journalist, a ruthless and exacting editor, and an effortless chameleon-like performer.”  ANNA DEAVERE SMITH IN STILLS FROM TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES WHICH WAS FILMED AS ONE OF PBS'S GREAT PERFORMANCES IN 2000 AFTER ITS TONY NOMINATION AND DRAMA DESK AWARD WIN.

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Rehearsals, Smith once noted, “were dramas in and of themselves.” Recently, in a video conversation for the Signature Theatre, she clarified: “Whenever people ask me how I whittled down 320 interviews to a play, I tell them I have a very dynamic rehearsal process with smart people who are more progressive than me and who don’t always agree with each other. I listen to them and then I go home and write a new play for the next day.”

Vinson Cunningham, theatre critic for The New Yorker, has called Smith’s plays “miracles of compression.” Citing a possible antecedent to her work in the Living Newspapers of 1930s’ Federal Theater Project, he writes: “You might think of Smith’s plays as Living Magazines: thoroughly reported, yes, but shot through with a chorus of sensibilities, curated into a higher coherence.”

He adds: “Editing is key to Smith’s art; she makes distant world views sometimes painfully proximate. Voices come in concert if not always in conversation. They differ in timbre, perhaps, but Smith places them so precisely that their parallels in attitude or style or content become apparent. When her people contradict one another directly, in succession, the collision clears the way for epiphany. Smith’s plays take pluralism as a given,

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but subtly synthesize it into a unified whole. (Another way to say this is that Smith delivers in art what America has chronically failed at in practice.)”

Smith is certainly aware of the truth of Cunningham’s last observation. Much of the three conversations she recorded for the Signature focus on the alarming similarities between the events surrounding the Rodney King beating and recent history. She is not naïve about theatre’s capacity to effect social change. Nonetheless, she knows theatre can play a role. If it cannot change society, it can certainly nudge the individual.

Here she is quoted at length from an introduction she wrote for a screening of the PBS version of Twilight: “In the end, Twilight is a document of what I, as an actress, heard in Los Angeles. In creating a ‘social drama,’ I am not proposing a specific solution to social problems. I turn that over to activists, scholars, legislators, and most importantly, to you, the audience. As an actress, I am exploring the process of becoming something that I am not—the process of walking in someone else’s shoes. Laws and legislation can create a context in which we can work toward better relations with one another. Yet laws are limited in their ability to teach us how to move

“Editing is key to Smith’s art; she makes distant world views sometimes painfully proximate. Voices come in concert if not always in conversation. They differ in timbre, perhaps, but Smith places them so precisely that their parallels in attitude or style or content become apparent. When her people contradict one another directly, in succession, the collision clears the way for epiphany.” from an individual position to a larger community.

“We need to reach for the core of our humanity with all its glory and all its challenges. I am seeking to illuminate something about humanness. The solutions lie not in my monologues but in the collaborative humanness of audience members who walk out of the theater with the potential to make change.

You anticipate me before the curtain goes up; I anticipate you

as the curtain goes down. I await your dialogue, your dramatic action. Twilight has been created specifically to encourage dialogue across lines of power and race. More importantly, it has been created to encourage you to act and to move us further along on our American journey to get to ‘We the people.’ Here is a place to start: Use the experience of seeing this film and the thoughts it evoked to start a conversation with someone whose race and social class are different from yours.”

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T WI LI GHT: LO S ANG E L E S, 1992

BEHIND THE CAMERA GEORGE HOLLIDAY WAS A 31 YEAR OLD immigrant from Argentina working as a selfemployed plumber and living with his wife in the Monte Vista apartments in Lake View Terrace when he recorded Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King.

Helicopters circling low overhead had awakened Holliday and his wife shortly after midnight on March 3, 1991. They moved to their balcony to investigate and witnessed police assaulting King. Holliday retrieved his camera, trained it on the action below in the street, and recorded what is now considered the first of a disturbingly long line of disturbingly similar videos to “go viral,” a term not in use at the time.

Holliday first contacted the Los Angeles police about the incident, but they refused to speak with him. He then contacted television station

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KTLA. The station paid Holliday $500 for the tape. It was soon broadcast on thousands of stations worldwide.

The camera, a Sony CDD-F77 video 8 Handycam, was new, a gift for Holliday’s wife. Holliday had used it only once before to video Arnold Schwarzenegger riding a motorcycle while filming a scene for Terminator 2 not far from the couple’s apartment.

The camera was subpoenaed by the police then in turn subpoenaed by the FBI when the four officers involved were charged with violating Rodney King’s

“Holliday first contacted the Los Angeles police about the incident, but they refused to speak with him. He then contacted television station KTLA.”  GEORGE HOLLIDAY WITH HIS CAMERA AFTER A NEWS CONFERENCE IN 1991.

PHOTO: CRAIG FUJII/ASSOCIATED PRESS.

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“He [King] said to me, ‘You saved my life.’ I didn’t know what to say.

We shook hands and said goodbye.” civil rights. Police also subpoenaed the tape from KTL, but the station had already made a copy.

Holliday did not receive the camera back until 2015—without the tape. Last July, he put the camera up for auction through Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles with a minimum bid of $225,000. Details about who, if anyone, acquired the camera are not available.

Holliday and King met just once, accidentally. In an interview with El País in 2017, Holliday said he bumped into King at a gas station about a year after the unrest, having never before spoken to him. “He [King] said to me, ‘You saved my life.’

I didn’t know what to say. We shook hands and said goodbye.”

In 2012, the year he died, King told the Los Angeles Times that while he had come to terms with his broader legacy, dealing with the

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past had not been easy. He reportedly struggled with alcohol and drug use, and was found dead in his swimming pool with high levels of both in his body. He was 47.

“I sometimes feel like I’m caught in a vice,” he had told the LA Times. “Some people feel like I’m some kind of hero. Others hate me. They say I deserved it.

Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I’m a fool for believing in peace.”

Today the idea and the serious impact of “citizen journalists” have been made commonplace by cell phones and the internet.

Holliday, who still works as a plumber, was one of the first. He explained why he put the camera up for auction.

“I hope this video camera inspires people to use their power to record events that they find troubling. Don’t be afraid to use it.”

“Last July, he put the camera up for auction through Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles with a minimum bid of $225,000. Details about who, if anyone, acquired the camera are not available.”  THE VIDEO CAMERA USED BY GEORGE HOLLIDAY TO RECORD THE RODNEY KING POLICE BEATING ON MARCH 3, 1991. PHOTO: NATE D. SANDERS AUCTIONS.

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