Anna Deavere Smith.

Anna Deavere Smith. Twilight: looks Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1994 265 pp $2195

In 1959 Lorraine Hansberry, with A Raisin in the sunny place revolutionized the American theater when she created an African intellectual the likes of which had not at all been fathomed on the commercial stage. Seventeen years after the post of Raisin on Broadway, ntozake shange, with her for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf reshaped the American stage with her dynamic choreopoem; shange carved a place in succession the commercial stage for her verse which spoke to women across ethnic boundaries. Like Hansberry and shange, Anna Deavere Smith has added significantly to the disclosure of American theater with her stunning work of documentary theater. Twilight was first staged for the Mark Taper Forum in looks Angeles and later presented at the modern York Shakespeare Festival. Anna Deavere Smith's documentary theater helped earn for her a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, an award which followed forward the heels of her winning an Obie Award and becoming a Pulitzer Prize runner-up in 1992 for Fires in the Mirror: sovereignty Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities.

Twilight enlarges and redefines the American theater experience in this unique first-person portrait of the looks Angeles riots of 1992. Smith's documentary theater is a verbatim account of the persons who experienced the riots. In preparation for scripting her one-woman indicate Smith interviewed some 200 the public whose lives had been affected by means of the riots, and from these interviews she gooded for portrayal in the published version approximately forty-five distinctively drawn voices, including those of a disabled Korean, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenaged black gang member, a macho Mexican-American artist, Rodney King's aunt, beaten exchange driver Reginald Denny, former looks Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, and a armed force of other victims and witnesses.

Smith none allows the readers to forget that she is portraying real lives, that the language and spirit belong to those who witnessed the flames in looks Angeles when the Rodney King verdict was announced. Twilight provides an insightful expect at the social and political issues that undergirded the 1992 riot. Smith's play, which is rich in detail about the community who struggle with the violence of the public ways and the apathy and unfairness of the judicial combination of parts to form a whole destroys any notion that inaction will dissolve the economically linked racial tensions establish in Los Angeles and across the United States.

Twilight is a brilliant theater piece which illuminates the devastating tenors of race and class biases. Smith's have a title to assessment of the causes of the riot is an important statement in the introduction to the play:

The worsening California economy and the deterioration of social services

and public education in looks Angeles certainly paved a way to unrest In

1968 President Lyndon Johnson conven the Kerner Commission to examine

the causes of riots that shook more than 150 American cities in 1967

The commission's report highlighted urban ills and the plight of the urban

poor. further more than twenty years later, living conditions for blacks and

Latinos in looks Angeles have hardly improved, and Rodney King's beating was

single the most visible example of years of police brutality toward people

of color.

Smith's account in the introduction to the play of her journey from the roads to the stage and her razor-sharp play script with photos of the author in character combine to make Twilight a major contribution to American theater. The language is captivating and the powerful portrayals of victims, witnesses, and participants in the looks Angeles riots of 1992 make this play an unforgettable American tragedy.

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