Anna Deavere Smith Retells Rodney King’s Story in Theatre

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2021

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” premièred nearly thirty years ago, but it’s one of the most current and important plays on Broadway right now. Anna Deavere Smith pioneered a form now known as verbatim theatre: instead of creating characters and writing dialogue, she would interview dozens or hundreds of people about an event, and weave a story from those real characters and their words. “Twilight” is about the deadly violence and unrest that erupted after police officers were acquitted of the ferocious beating of Rodney King—one of the first episodes of police brutality caught on videotape and broadcast to the nation. Her form, she tells David Remnick, let her complicate the racial dynamics of Black and white people, to include the voices of Asian Americans and Latinx people involved in the uprising. Deavere talks about how the play reads now, after George Floyd’s murder and the uprising that followed, and about what still hasn’t changed in the cultural climate for Black theatre artists.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC
0:07.8	studios and The New Yorker.
0:14.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the most thrilling and disturbing
0:20.0	shows in New York right now is a play by Anna Devere
0:23.1	Smith called Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992.
0:27.1	It's about the violence and unrest that erupted after the Rodney King verdict nearly 30 years
0:32.3	ago when police officers who had nearly beaten him to death were acquitted.
0:38.3	That act of violence was one of the first examples of police brutality caught on video.
0:43.7	Everyone saw it, and it couldn't be unseen.
0:47.3	And in the wake of last year's George Floyd uprising, Twilight has taken on an even deeper
0:52.4	resonance in meaning in American life.
0:55.4	When Twilight premiered on Broadway in 1994, it represented something of a revolution in American
1:01.4	theater. Anna DeVier Smith talked to more than 300 people in Los Angeles, people of different
1:07.5	races and different perspectives. They discussed everything.
1:11.1	They discussed race, the Rodney King beating, and the details of their own lives.
1:16.3	That was the mood at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
1:19.0	Safety in numbers.
1:20.3	It's like a fortress.
1:22.3	And we were just like, here we are, and we're still alive,
1:27.1	and we hope that people will be alive when we come out.
1:30.3	If white folks were to experience black sadness, it would be too overwhelming.
1:41.3	Very few whites could take seriously black sadness and still live the lives that they live in.
	...

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