FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT
What Happened?
By Anna Deavere Smith
The first performance of my play Fires in the Mirror at the Public Theater in New York about a 1991 race riot in Brooklyn was cancelled because the Los Angeles riots/social explosion/uprising/revolution, as it was variously called, had rocked the nation the night before. I actually think Fires... was a hit in part because of what happened in L.A. Americans pay little attention to race unless there’s a catastrophic event that brings it into consciousness.
Gordon Davidson came to see Fires. The experience of seeing the play evoked memories for him of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, which he had directed in the 1970s at the Taper and on Broadway. He invited me to have breakfast, and, at a restaurant in the Algonquin Hotel of all places, we decided I should come to Los Angeles to apply my process of making plays out of interviews, exploring sometimes opposing points of view.
When I arrived in L.A., at the first planning meeting, Gordon reached his hand inside his breast pocket, as gentlemen did in those days, and took out a “buck slip” (before cellphones, folks who could make things happen carried stationery the size of a dollar in the breast pockets of their suits to make notes). “What do you need?” He asked, as he poised his pen. Until then, conversations about my work in theatre and academia were limited to “Here’s what you get.”
The list Gordon jotted on his buck slip became the blueprint for how I create cultures of work to this very day. He and a large team at the Taper pushed an extraordinary number of logistics forward, even as the city was still unsettled. Many of you reading this program note may have forgotten (or are too young to know or were not even born at the time) that, for example, there were actually two trials. President Bush Sr. ordered a second trial. The city was on pins and needles that if that jury still came back with all not guilty verdicts that there would be another riot.
The city was full of factions. In fact, I had to begin every interview by asking, “What do you call what happened here?” If I called it a riot, and the interviewee considered it a revolution, my misnaming it could cost me the interview. People were on edge. So, foremost in my mind was the need for a multicultural brain trust. In the early ‘90s, the limits within which we discussed race were confined to a Black-white paradigm. Dramatization of the social explosion in Los Angeles called for more than that. First on my list of needs was to put together a circle of individuals from different communities who listened well, read deeply, and analyzed the world in front of us with a mixture of keen scrutiny and hope. What we now call EDI is not enough if there’s no support for a space in which we reckon with the failure of and betrayals of language. As I held my breath, I was relieved that Gordon gave no push back to funding this brain trust and immediately started jotting names.
Number one on the list was Dorinne Kondo, an anthropologist, an Americanist, and scholar of Asian American studies (heavy on the scrutiny). I also needed someone to take me around the Latino community. Enter Héctor Tobar, a young, energetic, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the Los Angeles Times, who is now a novelist (heavy on the hope). I also asked Gordon to includeElizabeth Alexander, an African American poet and scholar, now President of the Mellon Foundation. The dynamic conversations between these three individuals, two of whom were relatively new to the theatre, should have been filmed. The conversations were often explosively emotional, but guess what? Everyone came to the work with good intentions and a common purpose: to tell the complicated story of what happened in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the shocking not guilty verdicts delivered in the trial of four police officers who beat motorist Rodney King. The beating had been captured on videotape, and the world saw one of the first visual evidences of police brutality. Everyone who watched the riot burst before them or who were directly affected by the riot had a story. No one had the story. No one person has the story of race in America. There is no one American story.
Though I am not involved in this production, other than to make a few adjustments to the text (I revised it so that the play could be performed by five actors after the murder of George Floyd), I was invited to the first rehearsal here in L.A. Kishisa Jefferson Ross–my assistant, driver, Sancho Panza of thirty years ago–showed up holding a thick black binder. With no Google Maps, just a Thomas Guide and a daily expanding list of interviewees secured under the leadership of producer Corey Madden, Kishisa and I travelled the massive landscape of Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. In looking at our schedule in the binder, I noted that we never stopped for lunch. Kishisa had the sense to bring food for herself. I survived on 10oz bottles of Martinelli’s apple juice when we could find cold ones.
With braces on her teeth and an angelic smile, Kishisa looked like the picture of innocence. I suspect that Kishisa, having grown up in South Central, had a lot to say, but she kept most of it to herself. She even kept quiet when she accompanied me to an interview with Daryl Gates, recently deposed from his throne as treacherous Police Chief. We met him at a radio station, and I interviewed him as he stood at a Xerox machine. Feral in his attitude, he did not sit down. Years later, Gates came over to me in a restaurant and told me his decision to hold the police during the riots was the biggest mistake of his life–it cost him his marriage, his career, his legacy. Kishisa’s professional silence was of particular value to the project. After all, my goal was to hear. From everyone.
Etched in my mind is the time that Kishisa and I got out of the car at Nickerson Gardens and proceeded to trek towards an interview. A fantastic-looking brother approached us. Even if Kishisa looked like she knew her way around, I did not, in my uniform: a Brooks Brothers skirt, linen jacket, and respectable flats. “What are y’all doing here?” he asked. I explained that we had an appointment at Nickerson Gardens. He said something to the effect of “Let me walk y’all over there. Y’all don’t belong walkin’ around here alone.”
One day, most likely on Kishisa’s brick-sized mobile phone (mobile phones were not common), we got a call from two Korean American UCLA graduate students, Kathryne Cho and Nancy Yoo. I recall them introducing themselves over the phone, saying that they heard what I was doing, and they were sure I was going “to get it wrong.” Immediately, I felt as if they were going to run me out of town–their town. What followed was the opposite. Kathryne and Nancy offered to help me. They escorted me around “their” world, introducing me to Korean Americans affected by the uprising, translating for me, getting doors to open that never would have opened without their help. Kathryne and her father invited me to worship with them one Sunday morning at their church in Koreatown. I will never forget its huge orchestra with a large string section. The contrast with music at First African American Methodist Episcopal–rousing gospel music but actually praising the same spirit–was powerful. I contacted Kathryne (now Yoon) recently, thanks to Facebook. She asked me during our phone call if I remembered that she and her father came to see Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and that her father brought flowers to me backstage. It was a gesture of grace–one that was natural, I am sure, for Dr. Cho (a dentist). I certainly do remember it.
The photographer Mary Ellen Mark wrote in the preface to the catalogue for her An American Odyssey that the camera provided her with the “necessary distance for getting close to strangers.” That’s what the tape recorder has provided for me. My journey is an existential one, as well as an artistic project. I have been trying to get close to America in spite of its many forms of segregation and its systems of dehumanization that line its history and its present, sometimes in the name of justice. The not guilty verdicts had been–even for Angelenos who’d thought of the police as protectors of their property–eye-opening. How could this happen in our country? As Bryan Stevenson has explained, and exemplified with his monumental lynching memorial, we are a post-genocidal society. The rampage against Native Americans was a bloody birth to our nation. And so, the betterment of society project has actually accompanied the darker moments in our history. We are not unique, and our times are not unprecedented. Our history is lined with that which was wrong, but it’s also lined with those who applied active vigilance and commitment to righting wrongs. Even the prosecutor in the Simi Valley trial could not have imagined that Officers Koon, Powell, Briseno, and Wind would actually walk. Acknowledging his underestimation of the multiple realities in our midst, he told me that he’d thought the guilty verdict was going to be a “slam dunk.”
Gordon and the staff at the Taper put an extraordinary amount of institutional commitment and muscle behind the project. Police Commissioner Stanley Sheinbaum, a friend of Gordon’s, so believed in the project that he met with me in London in the early days of putting it together and told me he was personally writing a check for $10,000–the first donation. The Taper and their friends gave me the opportunity to hear the shouts and whispers of this city. The people of Los Angeles were tangled in a crisis, but their beautiful and mesmerizing words flowed forward every single time I pushed the button on my Sony cassette recorder and asked one simple, but always provocative, question: “What happened?”
