Review: Embodying Justice in ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992’

For Anna Deavere Smith, the transcript is the tool. A fine tool, certainly: Her brand of verbatim theater, perfected in a series of documentary plays since the early 1980s, duplicates the expressive peculiarities of real speech, making every defensive stammer and evasive curlicue count.

But thrilling as it is, mere mimicry is never the point. In an essay Smith describes actors as “cultural workers” reaching out, through words, into “that which is different from themselves.” Her goal is ambitious: to undo tribalism by modeling the innately human ability to empathize even with enemies.

This makes for some very complex drama when you don’t know who the enemy is. In “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” which opened in a watered-down yet still urgent revival by the Signature Theater Company on Monday evening, Smith juggles excerpts from 320 interviews with people on all sides of the riots that broke out in the city’s South Central neighborhood that year. Arranging them in kaleidoscopic patterns, she keeps your sympathies switching so fast you find yourself experiencing a kind of moral whiplash.

Smith often plays every character in the first major productions of her plays. In “Twilight,” that means swiftly embodying some 40 people of various ages, genders and ethnicities. Talking about the uprising that followed the acquittal of the police officers who viciously beat King in 1991, they try to explain what happened, no two having the same point of view.

Some see the events through a professional lens, whether as politicians, reporters, academics or activists. But most of the interviewees are emotional rather than analytical, as members of the Black, white, Hispanic and Asian American communities — whether they participated in the post-verdict mayhem or were beaten as bystanders or hid out in horror in Beverly Hills — poke through the rubble for clues to the cause. Is it to be found as far back as the Watts riots of 1965? Or as recently as the fatal shooting of a local 15-year-old Black girl by a Korean American store owner two weeks after King was beaten?

When the store owner receives a sentence of five years’ probation, and then King’s attackers are likewise let off without prison sentences, justice seems like a zero-sum game to the play’s Black characters: What privileges one community is taken from another. Yet when everyone is embodied by one actor, as was the case when “Twilight” debuted in Los Angeles in 1993, followed by runs at the Public Theater and on Broadway in 1994, the audience is led to a different conclusion: Justice is all or nothing. It can’t exist anywhere if it doesn’t exist everywhere.

Unfortunately, the power of that idea is attenuated in the Signature production, directed by Taibi Magar in the 294-seat Irene Diamond auditorium. As part of Smith’s multiyear residency at the theater, “Twilight” has been staged as an ensemble piece, the roles divvied among five actors. Smith has also revised the script heavily, mostly in ways that support the casting at the expense of the drama.

This is less noticeable when, in the more substantial monologues, characters describe, with pathos and unintentional poetry, what they saw or what they felt. Among several others, King’s aunt (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), a city clerk who witnessed the beating (Elena Hurst) and the wife of a Korean American shopkeeper shot during the unrest (Francis Jue) get enough time to create affecting portraits.

But when the script calls for shorter snippets and quicker alternation, too much energy is dissipated in the handoffs, sometimes involving the donning or shedding of Linda Cho’s sociologically precise costumes. Even so, they remind you how Smith could switch sides in milliseconds, with the help of just a scarf or a tie or a cup of tea.

It is something of a paradox that the divided casting also results in caricature, as the actors overcompensate, in a way Smith never did, for the difficulty of achieving contrast. The story told in the published script by a juror in the federal trial of the King assailants is here reframed as a self-conscious scene involving the whole cast; it still has powerful elements, to be sure, yet unintentionally broad results. And in a passage called “A Dinner Party That Never Happened” — projections by David Bengali help keep the audience oriented on an otherwise neutral stage — the piercing opinions of characters at an imaginary soiree hosted by the chef Alice Waters now come off as bon mots.

Also not helping: the appearance of a cheap-laugh Charlton Heston, twitting his liberal friends who suddenly want a gun.

Experimentation in the production of classics is crucial, especially in that difficult passage after their debut when most new works disappear. Smith, who is 71, no doubt hopes to see her work performed in the future as much as possible and is exploring ways to ensure that.

Still, I found myself wondering why she, and Magar, whose staging is caught between the simplicity of the original premise and an unachieved larger one, chose this form of experiment.

In light of recent discussions about representation in the theater, perhaps it seemed wise to give actors whose identities in some ways match that of the characters the chance to portray them. This is handled well by being handled unstrictly: Jue, the great-grandson of Chinese immigrants, plays several Asian American characters, both male and female, but also (with great depth) the Black soprano Jessye Norman. Yet other times, the matchups feel too obvious or, as in the mostly similar roles performed by Karl Kenzler and Wesley T. Jones, too blurry.

And perhaps there was concern that the story itself, now nearly 30 years old, needed the punch of physical confrontation that more bodies allow. That too strikes me as a mistake. The Signature’s 2019 revival of Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror,” about the unrest between Blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights in 1991, proved that her plays are vigorous enough to stand as written, and that one very flexible and compelling actor — in that case, Michael Benjamin Washington — could walk in Smith’s shoes as successfully as she walked in her characters’.

Though I wish “Twilight” had taken the same approach, it nevertheless demands attention in any format. Its nuanced portrayal of the cycle of violence — and its exploration of the means of breaking it — are obviously just as necessary now as when Los Angeles was actively smoldering. If the production makes the play more of a lesson than it needs to be, Smith’s notion that history depends on individuals more than groups, a notion best dramatized with one body, still comes through with five.

Or with 294; we are all, in a way — and whether we want to be or not — cultural workers. “Twilight” doesn’t just ask us to build empathy but also demonstrates how.

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
Through Nov. 14 at Signature Theater, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.