'Fires in the Mirror' (Signature Theatre Company)

One of the problems with political theater—or socio-political theater—is that it often ages quickly and may consequently be diminished in revival.  I think that’s visible in the Signature Theatre Company’s revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, her 1992 performance piece about the racial and religious conflicts in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that flared up in August 1991, when a 7-year-old Afro-Caribbean boy was struck and killed by a car driven by a Hasidic man, leading to the stabbing death of a Jewish scholar at the hands of a black teenager.

It’s not that the underlying forces of this conflict and the unrest and violence that led to and came from it have been resolved now, 28 years later.  If anything, they’re worse now than in 1992—more open, more vicious, more seemingly irreconcilable and intractable.  In one of Fires’ monologues, a Lubavitcher woman says, “Average citizens do not go out and . . . drive vans into seven-year-old boys. . . .  It’s just not done.”  That was 1991. 

Since then, how many times have we read about or seen on television where someone did drive a car into innocents?  It was 26 years before a white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a 32-year-old woman.  It was 24 years before another white supremacist strolled into a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine congregants to death and 27 years before an anti-Semite entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a Sabbath morning and gunned down 18 members of the congregation, killing eleven.  (And just two days ago, two anti-police and anti-Semitic shooters killed three people in a targeted attack at a Kosher grocery in Jersey City, New Jersey.)

Maybe in 1991 people didn’t do things like that.  Yet.  But they do now, and Fires in the Mirror is too old to have acknowledged it.  It’s almost to race in America what Reefer Madness is to the opioid crisis—its perspective is clouded over with age and a kind of innocence that no longer applies.  As a cri de coeur, it’s been weakened by the passage of time.  My God!  9/11 has happened since then . . . and Columbine and Sandy Hook and a second gulf war and one in Afghanistan (both of which are still going on) and Syria and genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo.  Fires is almost too gentle to break through to spectators who’ve lived through all that and so much more.

I think, too, that we’re perhaps too acquainted with the events and aftermath of Crown Heights.  Almost as soon as the events initiated by the death of Gavin Cato, the little boy, and the revenge murder of Yankel Rosenbaum began, Anna Deavere Smith was out interviewing residents of Crown Heights and others with thoughts about the upheaval such as artists, activists, and leaders of the various communities touched by the events.  It was less than a year later that Fires in the Mirror opened in New York City.  It was all still fresh, raw, shocking.  Now it’s historical.  Historical and, sadly, familiar.

There are some other problems I had with Fires, having to do with its status as a piece of theater, but I’ll get to those in a bit.  Let’s back up and I’ll cover the part of the report that’s for the record: the who-what-where-when part.

The première of Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities—as it was originally  titled—was at the Susan Stein Shiva Theater of the Joseph Papp Public Theater from 1 May to 28 June 1992.  (Fires was set to première at the Public on 30 April, but the day before, when a mostly white jury acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, rioting broke out in Los Angeles and the Public briefly closed over fears of racial violence in New York City.  Smith’s next work at STC will be Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, her 1994 performance piece on the L.A. riots.  It’s scheduled to open on 28 April 2020 in the Irene Diamond Stage.)

The Public Theater début production was directed by Christopher Ashley with Smith playing all 26 roles over 90 minutes.  The Public presentation won the 1993 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Director (Ashley), 1993 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Actress (Smith), 1993 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance (Smith), and 1992 Obie Award, Special Citation (Smith). Fires was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

On 28 April 1993, American Playhouse, the Public Broadcasting Service’s theater program, aired a performance of Fires in the Mirror adapted by and starring Smith, and directed by George C. Wolfe, who’s featured in the show’s cast of characters and that year became the artistic director of New York’s Public Theater. 

There were numerous productions around the country and abroad following the première, most featuring Smith in her lauded one-woman performance, but the current Signature Theatre Company revival is the first in New York City since the 1992 début.  It’s Smith’s first offering in her Residency 1 tenure at STC, the company’s core one-year playwright-in-residence program. 

The 1¾-hour, intermissionless show started previews in the variable-space, black-box Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row on 22 October 2019; the production opened on 11 November.  Diana, my usual theater companion, and I caught the 8 p.m. performance on Saturday, 23 November; STC’s Fires is scheduled to close on 22 December (after having been extended from its original closing date of 24 November first to 1 December and then 8 December).

Directed for STC by Saheem Ali (The Rolling Stone by Chris Urch, Lincoln Center Theatre, July 2019; Jocelyn Bioh’s Nollywood Dreams, upcoming at MCC Theater in March 2020), this new staging features Michael Benjamin Washington (Broadway’s The Boys in the Band, 2018; also 2020’s film adaptation for Netflix) performing 28 monologues by 25 characters; he’s one of the few actors to take on Smith’s solo role in Fires.  As for the text, Smith says she “dropped one character [Leonard Jeffries, Jr., controversial African-American former professor at the City College of New York] and . . .made one change” for the STC edition.

Before I synopsize Smith’s play, for those (perhaps few) who don’t know or don’t recall the context, maybe I better run down the outline of the events of that August. 

Crown Heights, a neighborhood in the center of Brooklyn, had a racially and culturally mixed population, mostly lower-middle-class working people.  In the 1960s and ’70s, New York City underwent a serious economic downturn and poverty exacerbated the relations among the diverse ethnic, national, and religious groups that make up this city.  This resulted in wholesale “white flight” from Crown Heights, creating a majority black population in the neighborhood, largely immigrants from the West Indies.  Only the Hasidic Jews insisted on remaining in Crown Heights when other white residents left.

Crown Heights has a large community of Hasidim from several different sects.  These are ultra-orthodox Jews (hasid means ‘pious’ in Hebrew) who adhere to a regimen founded in the 18th century in the Ukraine and spread to other regions of Eastern Europe.  The sects are named after the towns in which their founding leaders lived, so the Lubavitcher Hasidim were originally from Lyubavichi, now in western Russia. 

Each Hasidic sect has its own distinctive garb, principally black, often most recognized by the hats the men wear.  The men don’t shave their beards and the married women cut their hair short or even shave it (depending on the sect’s practice) and wear wigs (sheitel in Yiddish) in public.  Obviously, they are recognizable figures on the streets of the city.  Because of religious and cultural principles, Hasidim keep themselves apart from outsiders, including other, less observant Jews.

On the evening of Monday, 19 August 1991, a three-car motorcade, including an unmarked police escort, was carrying the spiritual leader of the Lubavitcher Hasidic community, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-94), known as the Rebbe, home from a weekly visit to the graves of his wife and his predecessor as Rebbe. The two lead cars crossed the intersection of President Street and Utica Avenue through a green light, but the signal turned yellow or maybe even red before the third car, a station wagon driven by 22-year-old Yosef Lifsh, could clear the intersection. 

Lifsh’s station wagon hit another car and careened onto the sidewalk.  Lifsh had steered the car to miss some adults in his path, but he didn’t see two children, Angela and Gavin Cato, 7-year-old Afro-Caribbean cousins, playing nearby.  The car hit the children, injuring Angela and killing Gavin, who was pinned under the station wagon.

Lifsh leaped from the car and began to try to lift it off the crushed boy, but neighborhood residents immediately attacked him and when the police arrived a few minutes after the crash, he was being beaten by the crowd.

At this point, accounts begin to differ.  A private ambulance from the Hasidic community and two from the city’s Emergency Medical Service arrived within minutes of one another.  The crowd was growing angrier and Lifsh and his two passengers were under more violent assault.  The police on the scene instructed the private ambulance to remove the Hasidic men from the scene.

City ambulances took Gavin and Angela to Kings County Hospital where Gavin was pronounced dead; his cousin survived.  A rumor quickly spread that the crew of the Jewish ambulance had ignored the injured black children in favor of the Jewish men.  These rumors ignited violence all over Crown Heights as residents threw rocks, bottles, and debris at police, stores, and homes.  Anyone perceived to be Jewish was especially targeted as some voices shouted for revenge.

A few hours later, five blocks from the crash site, a dozen or more black youths attacked 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting scholar from Australia doing research for a doctorate.  He was stabbed four times and Rosenbaum identified Lemrick Nelson, 16, at the scene as his attacker.

Ironically, Rosenbaum was also taken to Kings County Hospital, where little Angela Cato was being treated and where Gavin had been declared dead.  The Jewish scholar died the next morning from a knife wound the medical staff had missed.

The Crown Heights riots went on for three days, devastating the neighborhood and resulting in numerous injuries.  On 27 August, Lemrick Nelson was charged with murder, the very day of Gavin Cato’s funeral. 

(After Smith composed Fires, a state trial ended in Nelson’s acquittal on 29 October 1992.  A year earlier, on 5 September 1991, a Brooklyn grand jury voted not to indict Yosef Lifsh, the driver whose car hit Gavin Cato, for any crime,  and Lifsh, who had waived immunity and testified, moved to Israel because of threats on his life. 

(On 11 August 1994, Nelson was arrested on federal charges of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights.  After a first federal trial was nullified on legal technical grounds, a second federal jury found Nelson guilty on 14 May 2003 and Nelson was sentenced to 10 years in prison.  During the trial, Nelson admitted to having stabbed Rosenbaum.  He served the full sentence (including time served before his 2003 trial) and was released on 2 June 2004, just shy of 29 years old.)

Fires in the Mirror was Smith’s response to the conflict among residents of the Crown Heights neighborhood and the violence that erupted when that tension reached the breaking point.  In my opinion, the play’s about the tribalism that was then in its infancy but which we now see in its full-blown consequences.  Living in close proximity but having almost no social interaction—and only minimal commercial contact—the African-American and African-Caribbean residents rankled under the discrimination and suppression they felt disenfranchised them, took away their voice while other groups seemed to prosper—groups like Jews, who had stood pretty solidly with them 25 years earlier on the front lines of the civil-rights movement.

Minister Conrad Mohammed, a New York minister for the Nation of Islam, after comparing the European slave trade with the World War II Holocaust, explains early in the play:

The Honorable Louis Farrakhan

teaches us

that we are the chosen of God.

We are those people

that almighty God Allah

has selected as his chosen,

and they are masquerading in our garment—

the Jews.

Then at the end of Fires, Carmel Cato, Gavin’s father, tells us:

Sometimes it make me feel like it’s no justice,

like, uh,

the Jewish people,

they are very high up,

it’s a very big thing,

they runnin’ the whole show

from the judge right on down.

The Jews, especially the Hasidim, kept themselves separate from their gentile neighbors, self-segregating for a combination of cultural and religious reasons.  (Carmel Cato also expressed his confusion about the Hasidic prohibition of women speaking to men to whom they’re not related—though Cato sees this as just a form of separation of the Jews from everyone else.)  As one woman, a Lubavitcher housewife, says: “I don’t love my neighbors.  I don’t know my Black neighbors.” 

This kind of separatism within a community resonates as much today because it not only hasn’t gotten better—it’s gotten worse.  Smith, I think, was trying to demonstrate the threat inherent in that self-segregation.  Author, orator, and scholar Angela Davis, the well-known African-American activist who was then a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says in Fires: “I’m not suggesting that we do not anchor ourselves in our communities . . . .  But I think that, you know, to use a metaphor, the rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow us to move into other communities to understand and learn.”  I think that’s Smith’s message.

The STC edition of Fires in the Mirror is a set of 28 monologues based on over 100 interviews Smith conducted in 1991 and ’92 with people involved in the Crown Heights crisis, both directly and as observers and commentators.  Each scene is entitled with the speaker’s name and a key phrase from the monologue. Each of the monologues in  STC’s Fires focuses on one character’s opinion and perspective of the events and issues surrounding the crisis.  Most of the characters have a single monologue except the Reverend Al Sharpton; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the feminist author and founding editor of Ms. magazine; and Norman Rosenbaum, the brother of Yankel Rosenbaum, the murdered Australian scholar, who each have two.

The monologues in Fires in the Mirror are grouped into themes which address issues of personal identity (“Identity,” “Mirrors”), differences in physical appearance (“Hair”), racial distinctions (“Race”), and the feelings regarding aspects of the conflict (“Crown Heights, Brooklyn August 1991,” the whole second half of the play).  Fires moves from one thematic issue to the next, finally narrowing in on questions specifically concerning the Crown Heights riot.

The play doesn’t draw any conclusions about any of the events of the conflict, presenting (much as did Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice, a 1985 documentary play, made no judgment about Dan White’s murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk in November 1978) points of view that the viewer is expected to assess for her- or himself.  Even where facts were concerned, Smith allowed the various reports and spins to carry their own weight.  As a metaphor for this conflict of views, the playwright presents Aron M. Bernstein, a professor (now emeritus) of nuclear and particle physics at MIT, to talk about mirrors—possibly in the words that gave Smith the title for her performance piece:

Okay, so a mirror is something that reflects light

. . . .

But physicists do

talk about distortion.

. . . .

I’ll give you an example—

if you wanna see the

stars

you make a big

reflecting mirror—

that’s one of the ways—

you make a big telescope

so you can gather a lot of light

and then it focuses at a point

and then there’s always something called the circle of confusion.

So if ya don’t make the thing perfectly spherical or perfectly

parabolic

then,

then, uh, if there are errors in the construction

which you can see, it’s easy, if it’s huge,

then you’re gonna have a circle of confusion,

you see?

So, like the mirror, our eyes all see the same thing, the same happening.  The “circle of confusion” comes into play with what our brains perceive, what our minds, with their prejudices and distortions, tell us happened.  This is what Fires explores.

Smith’s documentary plays of this genre have been dubbed “verbatim theater,” which means that the playwright doesn’t so much compose the scripts as assemble them from the words the characters, who are real people, said in interviews or other recorded forms (transcripts, letters, journals, videos, and so on).  I wrote about this a little in a post entitled “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama” (published on Rick On Theater on 9 October 2009). Of Smith’s kind of dramaturgy, I wrote:

In place of the conventional non-fiction play, perhaps, were the documentaries of such performance artists as Anna Deavere Smith, who creates her own documents through interviews and then recreates the personages who’ve been affected by such historical events as the Crown Heights riots in New York (Fires in the Mirror) or those that followed the acquittals in the first Rodney King beating trial in Los Angeles (Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992). 

. . . almost all recent documentary plays have been based on interviews with living participants or witnesses. . . .  This trend, if not begun by Anna Deavere Smith ([Emily] Mann employed the tactic in her 1977 monodrama, Annulla Allen, and her 1980 play about a violent Vietnam veteran, Still Life) then certainly given prominence and cachet by her performances, seems to be linked to the near ubiquitousness of 24-hour news programs, public confessions on television, and the focus of our news media on personalities rather than great events.

Besides being a playwright and actress, Smith (b. 1950), a native of Baltimore, Maryland, is an author, journalist, and teacher who’s best known for the one-woman plays in which she examines the social issues behind major events such as the Crown Heights and Los Angeles riots, the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press (House Arrest, 1997), and the pipeline from school to prison for poor and minority Americans (Notes from the Field, 2016).

Smith studied linguistics at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) near Philadelphia, earning a B.A. (1971) before moving to San Francisco to study acting at the American Conservatory Theatre, where she earned an M.F.A. degree in 1977.  The following year she took a position teaching drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (1978–79).  While there, Smith explored methods for actors to create characters by studying real people—as a child, she discovered a talent for mimicry—engaged in actual conversations.  Inspired by this exploration, she launched her ongoing project, On the Road: A Search for American Character. She later taught at the University of Southern California (1986–89) and at Stanford University (1990–2000)..

Smith currently teaches in the Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (which examines the nexus of politics, activism, and art) and teaches courses on the art of listening at the NYU School of Law.

In addition to being cast in All My Children, the daytime television drama, Smith wrote and performed several well-received plays as part of On the Road.  Her breakthrough work was Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, which received high critical praise.  Her next offering was Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.

In 2000, Smith joined the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.  In 2008, she premiered Let Me Down Easy, a one-woman play which explored the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body.  Smith portrayed more than 20 characters who spoke out about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, steroid use among athletes, AIDS in Africa, and the U.S. health care system.  Another one-woman play was Notes from the Field, later adapted into a TV movie (2018) in which Smith also starred in a variety of roles.

While engaging in theatrical and academic pursuits, Smith also acted on screen.  She appeared in several television shows, including Nurse Jackie (2009-15), The West Wing (1999-2006), and Black-ish (2014-present).  Smith also performed in such films as Dave (1993), The American President (1995), The Manchurian Candidate remake (2004), Rachel Getting Married (2008), and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).

Smith is the author of Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (Random House, 2000), in which she sets out to discern the essence of America by listening to its people and trying to capture its politics in places ranging from the 1996 presidential conventions to a women’s prison, and Letters to a Young Artist (Anchor Books, 2006), the author’s advice to aspiring artists of all stripes on the full spectrum of issues that people starting out will face, from questions of confidence, discipline, and self-esteem, to fame, failure, and fear, to staying healthy, presenting yourself effectively, building a diverse social and professional network, and using your art to promote social change.  

In addition to many honorary degrees, Smith was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (the “genius grant”) in 1996 for “creat[ing] a new form of theater—a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, and intimate reverie,” and the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2013.  That same year, she was awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, given to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life”; it’s one of the most prestigious and richest prizes in the American arts.  In 2015, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Smith for the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities, delivering a lecture entitled “On the Road: A Search for American Character.”  She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

STC’s production is designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, whose set is so simple as to be almost nondescript: a desk and chair down center, two lecterns, and a wooden box-cum-cabinet to store the costume bits Michael Benjamin Washington uses visually to suggest his characters—which include a Hasidic housewife, a teenaged Haitian girl, a frustrated young black man, and a prominent Lubavitcher rabbi. 

The stage of variable-space Linney Theatre is configured as a sort of proscenium house, with the raised stage at one end and the seats all arrayed on risers going back from the front of the high platform.  (Diana and I were sitting in the second row, which was not only very close to the stage, but with the three-to-3½-foor stage height, we were looking up at Washington for the whole performance.)

The set’s main feature is its mirrored back wall, the top section of which is cantilevered toward the stage so we see Washington from above; we also see ourselves watching him.  This clearly is a visual reference to the “mirrors” of the play’s title.  

Maldonado’s mirrors provide a marvelous surface for Hannah Wasileski’s projections of black-and-white photos of scenes from the riots.  (Also projected on the mirrors are the titles of the thematic blocks and each monologue—which are all also reflected in the upper section of the mirrored wall, but backwards.)  With two large reflective surfaces dominating the set, lighting designer Alan C. Edwards employs side lighting that highlights Washington in the darkness.

Each of Dede M. Ayite’s costume pieces, which Washington pulls out of the storage box and layers over his basic garb of white shirt and black pants as he’s beginning the speech, uses an unassuming object to limn each speaker, such as Sharpton’s medallion, for example; other objects included a pair of glasses, a head scarf, a hat, or a tea cup.  Mikaal Sulaiman’s soundscape includes the noises of the environment, such as the shouts of an angry crowd, along with evocative effects like the reverberation during Norman Rosenbaum’s funeral speech for his brother.

This brings me to the performance itself, the acting of Michael Benjamin Washington. 

I don’t know Washington’s work at all really, except from reviews and write-ups.  The reports are excellent as far as I’ve read, and I don’t really have any complaints about his work in Fires.  It’s solid and forceful, and he creates distinct personae for all the speakers he brings on stage for Anna Deavere Smith, for whom he stands proxy.

But therein lies the rub.  Washington isn’t Smith.  Oh, I don’t mean he’s not the actor she is or that he’s not as versatile or perceptive as she is; that’s not the issue.  First, Smith created the document she performed: she selected the people she’d put on stage, she chose the excerpts of the interviews she included in the script, she arranged the pieces according to her own inspirations and intentions.  As much as the words she spoke were the interviewee’s words, they were Smith’s words, too. 

Second, the events about which her subjects were talking were fresh when the documentarist took the words down.  They were hot, and they were still hot when she started to make the performance that ended up on the Public Theatre stage 27 years ago.  She didn’t have to imagine the circumstances of the speeches, do all that Stanislavsky stuff to make them real for her—she was there, man!  I don’t know how much of the actual aftermath of the riots Smith witnessed firsthand—she was on the spot right after the events unfolded, but the echoes and ripples went on for weeks and months afterward—but she was in the room with the people who were there, including Gavin Cato’s father and Yankel Rosenbaum’s brother. 

Finally, Smith didn’t just impersonate the people she’d met the way, say, Bryan Cranston did Lyndon Johnson in All The Way, or Bertie Carvel played Rupert Murdoch and Jonny Lee Miller did Larry Lamb in Ink.  She came closer to channeling the characters of Fires in the Mirror.  She almost recreated them. 

Apparently, the New York Times’ Ben Brantley feels the same way, as he wrote in his Fires notice: “This personal closeness to the material—and the fact that the incidents discussed here were still raw in the memories of most New Yorkers—gave the [original] production a rare urgency.”

Washington can’t do those things.  Smith was barely removed from what she was writing about and the people she was portraying.  Washington is almost three decades and lightyears removed from them and their milieu in the play.  It’s not his fault, and it’s not director Ali’s fault.  It’s also not Smith’s fault.  For Washington, STC’s Fires is an acting gig—and he does it really well.  When Smith did it, it was something else.  Smith didn’t just create verbatim texts—she practiced a kind of “verbatim performance.” 

(Full confession: I’ve never seen Smith do either Fires in the Mirror or Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 live.  I saw the 1993 PBS broadcast and I’m aware that seeing the performance on TV isn’t the same as seeing it on stage—but I think I can extrapolate from my cooler experience what the hotter one was probably like.  Indeed, Ben Brantley even advised, “You can still feel that rush of warmth by watching the PBS television adaptation of the show,” and provided a link to a YouTube video of a 14½-minute excerpt of the 1993 performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkrUJny0CE.)

Back in the ’90s, the press around the country greeted Fires with expressions like “dynamic” (Newsweek), “stunning” (African American Review; Saint Louis), “remarkable feat” (New Republic), “profoundly moving” (Variety), “a harrowing portrait” (New Yok Times), and “captivating” (Los Angeles Times).  Frank Rich’s New York Times review of the Public Theater première dubbed Fires in the Mirror “quite simply, the most compelling and sophisticated view of urban racial and class conflict, up to date to this week, that one could hope to encounter in a swift 90 minutes” and labeled it “ingenious.”

As for the critical response to the current Fires, I remind readers, as I explained in my report on Measure for Measure (posted on Rick On Theater on 14 August 2019) that Show-Score, the website whose surveys of published reviews I used to consult and report their tallies, no longer rates the notices, so the stats that I habitually reported are no longer being calculated.  (I quoted Show-Score’s press release with the CEO’s rationale for the change below the Measure report with a link to the document.)  I’ve selected 14 published notices of STC’s Fires which I will summarize.

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness warned that Fires “can be heavy going at times.”  The reviewer demurred some, observing that Smith’s “consistent detachment and refusal to pass judgment make Fires into a radical exercise in theatrical empathy that illuminates a salient episode in recent New York history.”  As I point out above, McGuinness reported that Fires “doesn’t attempt to offer a comprehensive account of what happened,” but “draws us into what one of her interviewees dubs a ‘circle of confusion’, where even basic factual clarity appears elusive amid the distortions of media coverage and a cacophony of political bickering.”  Washington, the FT reviewer wrote, “performs . . . with virtuosic dexterity” and his portrayals of the characters’ “mannerisms and speech patterns seem vividly authentic.”  “Saheem Ali’s stripped-down staging” serves the play and Washington well, noted McGuinness, comparing Ali’s style to that of Peter Brook.

“Nearly three decades after it was first unveiled, the panoramic view provided by Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Fires in the Mirror’ still makes you catch your breath and shake your head in sorrow,” observed Brantley of the New York Times.  Calling STC’s production a “crystalline revival,” Brantley invoked the same Bernstein passage from the play that FT’s McGuinness cited: “its reflective surfaces seem, if anything, more acutely focused, its patterns both sharper and more damning.”  The Timesman characterized Washington as a “remarkable young actor” and reported that Ali’s direction “energizes with its sheer force of clarity.” 

The Times reviewer acknowledged that “even as you’re aware of how deeply divided this nation remains” while watching Fires, “no one who attends this production is likely to leave clogged with despair.”  “It’s one of the consolations of first-rate art that there is somehow always hope in being able to see with newly unobstructed eyes.”  He added that Smith’s play “is indeed confirmed here as an enduring work of theatrical art.” 

Brantley felt that the STC revival, which he described as “rendered with uncommon elegance and precision,” “is cooler in its approach and, inevitably, more distanced—both by time and by Smith’s absence on the stage.”  Washington “doesn’t have Smith’s gift for transformative mimicry, and you only rarely feel he actually becomes the people he portrays.”  Still, the actor “always gives you enough characterizing detail to make everyone come to life.”  If Fires provides no more of a solution to the tribal conflicts in America today than it did 27 years ago, Brantley felt, “it lays the enduring groundwork for the kind of sane, open-eyed conversation that is too rarely held these days and has never felt more necessary.”

Calling Fires “a unique and poignant experience” in the New York Amsterdam News, the African-American weekly published in Harlem, Christina Greer lauded “the thoughtfulness and reflection Michael Benjamin Washington brings to this work.”  The actor “approached the role with a level of tenderness and understanding I have rarely seen,” asserted the review-writer.. “The play stands the test of time,” Dr. Greer felt, because “so many of the monologues could have been written just yesterday.”  As a conclusion, Dr. Greer urged, “I suggest you don’t miss this moving piece of art.”

In the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham found that the STC revival of Fires in the Mirror “feels like a test of Smith’s method: Can these old words live again in someone new?”  Cunningham praised Washington as “viscerally smart, endlessly empathetic,” making “the work sing, and the voices of its real people sound eerily vivid.”  The New Yorker reviewer reported, “On a recent night, some audience members interacted with [Washington], finishing his sentences and goading him forward, carrying on a conversation with the past.”

“A theatrical time capsule that feels eerily timely” is how Time Out New York’s Raven Snook characterized Smith’s Fires, adding that it’s getting “an appropriately fiery revival at the Signature.”  While Snook asserted that Washington “doesn’t possess Smith’s uncanny abilities as a mimic,” she did praise “his remarkable talent” for “conjur[ing] 25 individuals of various ages, genders, ethnic backgrounds and viewpoints” and “imbu[ing] each person with specificity, authenticity and soul.”  The woman from TONY felt that director Ali “deserves credit for eliciting this impressively fluid performance,” although she found “minor missteps in this production—too much stage business, an excessively literal set.”  In her final analysis, Snook concluded that STC’s revival “is a stirring rendition of an urgent work of art.”  In the end, she declared, “Fires in the Mirror helps us hear each other.”

Zachary Stewart observed on TheaterMania that Fires had “a ripped-from-the-headlines quality when Smith performed it at the Public Theater in 1992 . . . .”  Then he asked: “But does this ‘relevant’ theater have the same impact when it is performed 27 years later, by an entirely different actor?”  I supplied my answer to this question earlier in this report, but Stewart’s opinion was that STC’s revival with Michael Benjamin Washington “proves that it does. . . .  Fires in the Mirror still shocks all these years later . . . .”  The review-writer judged that director Ali “stages an elegant production that keeps the focus on the actor” and he had praise for all the designers’ work.

Though Washington’s “portrayal feels soberer than Smith’s,” the TM reviewer found, “He fully inhabits each character, marinating in their complexity and contradictions.”  Stewart also reported that Washington “is also a less operatic actor than the occasionally over-the-top Smith”; however, his “natural performance style is genuinely felt, and easily believable.”  Stewart’s ultimate judgment of the play is that “Twenty-seven years on, Fires in the Mirror is still depressingly relevant because the same racial tensions stubbornly persist. . . .  Smith doesn’t offer any solutions, but she does force her audience to take a good, hard look in the mirror.”

On his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter labeled Fires in the Mirror a “remarkable one-person docudrama” and stated that its “first-class revival” at STC is “still relevant.”  Leiter reported that “under Saheem Ali’s pinpoint direction,” and “in the supple, chameleon-like hands of Michael Benjamin Washington,” the role “comes as close as humanly possible” to Smith’s original performance, which had impressed Leiter immensely.  The blogger noted that few “solo plays . . . have had the political and social impact of Fires in the Mirror.”

Early in her review of Fires, New York Stage Review’s Melissa Rose Bernardo lamented, “A tiny part of me wished that the current . . . Signature Theatre revival . . . would feel dated in some way.”  Then she was reminded of our current state of bias (“The hatred is so deep seated and the hatred knows no boundaries,” Bernardo quoted Jewish Community Relations Council’s Michael S. Miller from the play) and prejudice (“We probably have seventy different kinds of bias, prejudice, racism, and discrimination,” says Robert Sherman, head of New York City’s Increase the Peace Corps)—probably some of the same incidents I mentioned.  As for the production, Bernardo lauded Washington for the way he “slips in and out of these roles almost imperceptibly.”

On Talkin' Broadway, James Wilson declared that, what with the spike in hate crimes (especially acts of anti-Semitism), Fires “offers an ominously accurate reflection of the troubled times in which we now live.”  Wilson reported, “Directed by Saheem Ali, the Signature production exceeds expectations” and that Washington “makes each person . . . distinctive and fully realized.”  “As a result,” explained the reviewer, “the play achieves a definitive and moving narrative arc” which is “enhanced by exceptional design by” the technical artists.  As for the revival, Wilson laments, “Nearly thirty years later, it is a shame that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater labeled Fires a “groundbreaking documentary play” whose “power comes roaring back in a revival at Signature.”  In Smith’s place, reported Mandell, “Michael Benjamin Washington giv[es] a fine performance . . . at the same time demonstrating the intrinsic strength and artistry of Smith’s work.” 

Michael Dale, on Broadway World, dubbed the STC revival of Fires a “striking new production” in which Washington “does a beautiful job of revealing the empathetic humanity of a community of characters.”  Dale observed, “Aided by a minimal number of costume pieces, Washington fluidly makes complete transformations” into all Smith’s diverse characters and the review-writer complimented the work of the designers in creating the play’s milieu.

On New York Theatre Guide, David Walters proclaimed that the Signature production of Fires “takes this bit of history and lifts it to a higher plane.”  Smith’s ability to find “the unexpected in viewpoint and the unguarded in personal truth” in 1991 “still stands today in the strong words that are spoken.”  Walters attributed this to “the wonderfully mesmerizing actor Michael Benjamin Washington who brings to life the 29 characters in full force and fury.”  The reviewer felt that the actor “surpasses capable and enters the realm of exquisite in his characterizations.”  Walters added that Ali’s direction “brought temperance and smoothness to the production” (that’s a reference to Hamlet’s “Advice to the Players,” for those who don’t recognize it—nice, David!) which “carries the piece forward from being a look-back to a this-is-us-now perspective that resonates in the now.” 

Simon Saltzman of CurtainUp characterized Fires as Smith’s “gripping one-person/thirty characters play” and noted that its revival comes along “at a time when it seems it couldn’t be more timely.”  Saltzman reported, “A terrific Michael Benjamin Washington . . . defines all the characters with the kinds of bravura touches that transcend mere reportage” and he complimented the STC designers’ work. 

Calling the Signature revival of Fires a “bedazzling revival” on TheaterScene.com, Darryl Reilly asserted that the many diverse characters of Smith’s docudrama “are given astounding portrayals by actor Michael Benjamin Washington” who “achieves one intense characterization after another” with the aid of Ayite’s costume bits.  Reilly praised the work of the designers and director Ali’s “superb command of stagecraft.” 

"Anna Deavere Smith Puts Herself Into Other People’s Words"

by Anna Deavere Smith

[Last week, I posted a report from PBS’s NewsHour on Washington, D.C.’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival, a region-wide collaboration of 25 theaters producing plays by women playwrights.  One of this country’s strongest and most prominent exemplars of women in theater, both as a writer and a performer, is Anna Deavere Smith, whose one-women plays have been unique and powerful theater for several decades.  

[Smith’s work is really a form of documentary theater, but instead of digging out records and hearing transcripts of long-past events, she creates her own documents of current issues by interviewing the participants, witnesses, and those affected—and then, channeling them from the stage in some of American theater’s most remarkable performances.  

[On 5 April, Smith presented her “Brief But Spectacular” essay on PBS NewsHour, an explanation of her perspective on how and why she does what she does.  Here is the transcript of that presentation.]

Anna Deavere Smith, actor, playwright and activist, says she has been trying to become America, word for word. By conducting interviews and creating a narrative, she aims to make a current problem come alive. Deavere Smith offers her Brief but Spectacular take on listening to people.

John Yang:  Finally, we turn to another installment of our series Brief But Spectacular, where we ask people about their passions.

Tonight, actor, playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith, widely known for her roles on “The West Wing” and “Nurse Jackie.” She has also earned critical acclaim for her one-woman shows. The latest, “Notes From the Field,” recently aired on HBO.

Smith shares her unique process for getting into character.

Anna Deavere Smith:  When I was a girl, my grandfather said that if you say a word often enough, it becomes you.

And I have been trying to become America word for word. In the way that you would think about putting yourself in other people shoes, I’m putting myself in other people’s words.

I interview people, and I learn what they say and try to put together a lot of disparate parts of interviews in one whole, in order to make a current problem come alive.

There are certain points in any interview that I do that people start to speak in a way where the rhythm, you know, leads me to believe that there’s emotions stored in there. And so, as an actor, emotions are my fuel, and those are the types of moments that I want to reenact on stage.

Drinking malt liquor. This is not the time for us to be playing the lottery or to be at the Horseshoe Casino. This is not the time for us to be walking around.

I was a mimic as a child. And, you know, I guess you could say that what I’m doing now is a more respectable version of that, which was — you know, inevitably, mimicry is a little bit subversive. I don’t mean to be subversive. I’m not an impressionist.

I’m delighted if audiences think something’s funny, but I’m not making fun of a person.

My most recent play, “Notes From the Field” was based on my having done 250 interviews around the United States on the subject of what we call the school-to-prison pipeline.

I’m interested in complicating the narrative and revealing to the people in my audience that there are many narratives. The more roots you have going off in different directions and grabbing the ground, you’re probably going to be a stronger tree. And that would be my objective.

All of my works of art is a form of activism. I don’t have answers. I don’t indict people. I can let the judges do that. I can let the media do that. I’m a dramatist.

A drama is always a constructive journey, where something is lost and then it’s going to be regained.

I went to New Orleans right after Katrina. And to watch people looking around at everything they lost and trying to make some sense and making an impromptu plan is really important to me in how I view the world.

You know, you could say, oh, my goodness, isn’t that so hard? Doesn’t that make you sad? For me, it’s the opposite. It shows me just how inventive people are.

I believe that the theater and other art forms are an opportunity to convene people around these issues and ask them while they’re sitting together to do something.

My name is Anna Deavere Smith, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on listening to people.

[The backstory of “Brief but Spectacular,” a weekly series that premièred on NewsHour in 2015, begins with creator Steve Goldbloom, the creator and host of the original comedy news show for PBS, “Everything But the News,” and his longtime producing partner Zach Land-Miller who conduct every interview off-camera and off-screen.  (The segments are all two to four minutes long and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.)  Each Thursday, “Brief but Spectacular” introduces NewsHour viewers to original profiles; these short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well.  These have included household names like actors Alec Baldwin and Carl Reiner, artist Marina Abramović,  and activist Bryan Stevenson.  Topics have included comedian, writer, and director Jill Soloway (Amazon’s original series Transparent) on gatekeepers in Hollywood, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on police reform in America, Abramović on the art of performance, author Michael Lewis on finding disruptive characters, performers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the rise of their hit Comedy Central series Broad City, engineer Jason Dunn on creating the first 3-D printer in space, and many more.]

"On The Real: Documentary Theatre"

Article 2

                                            

[I’m doing something a little different with Rick On Theater  the rest of this month.  When the September issue of American Theatre magazine came out, I saw that there was an article on documentary theater, which, as ROTters know, is a subject of interest to me.  (See my article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” posted on 9 October 2009.)  I figured I’d republish the AT piece in an upcoming slot on the blog.  When I went to the AT website to download the article for my files, I found that there wasn’t just one article but a series; the others weren’t all published in the magazine’s print edition.  There are seven articles, three of them too short to run alone so I combined them.  So I have a series of five potential posts about documentary theater.  I’ve decided to shorten the gap to three days between posts (as I often do for related pieces), and post all five selections in a row starting today, 15 September.   The only other time I republished a bunch of pieces together like this was a series of six open letters on theater by Washington Irving I ran in August 2010.

               

[The overall on-line reference for all seven documentary theater articles is on the American Theatre [Theatre Communications Group; New York] website dated 22 August 2017, http://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/on-the-real-documentary-theatre (which has links to the separate articles).  The individual articles and the dates on which I’ll post them (under the blog heading “On The Real: Documentary Theatre,” the series’ umbrella title) are as follows: “A History of U.S. Documentary Theatre in Three Stages” by Jules Odendahl-James, 15 September; “Ringside? Let’s Take Down the Ropes” by Anna Deavere Smith, 18 September; “Real Talk About Real Talk” by Amelia Parenteau, 21 September; “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Documentary Theatre?” by Parenteau, 24 September;  “A Room Full of Mirrors” by Rob Weinert-Kendt, 27 September; “‘Foreign to Myself’ Delves Beyond the Trauma of War” by Brad Rhines, 27 September;  and “Our Reflection Talks Back” by Carol Martin, 27 September.]

ON THE REAL: DOCUMENTARY THEATRE | THEATRE HISTORY

RINGSIDE? LET’S TAKE DOWN THE ROPES

By Anna Deavere Smith

Theatre ought to grow our moral imagination in a time of crisis. How do we get there—and who is ‘we’?

A version of the following speech was presented on June 23, 2016, as the opening plenary of Theatre Communications Group’s national conference in Washington, D.C., almost 20 years to the day after playwright August Wilson delivered his influential “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech on June 26, 1996, at TCG’s conference in Princeton, N.J. Portions of this text formed part of Notes From the Field, which Smith has performed at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and Second Stage Theater in New York City.

End of summer, 1996.

I had stepped off the campaign trail—which was where I spent a lot of the summer and fall of 1996, doing research for my play, House Arrest: The American Press and Its Relationship to the Presidency. I was traveling on both President Clinton’s campaign plane and on Bob Dole’s. I even traveled with the Young Republicans on a train into San Diego, where the Republican convention was staged, and to Chicago for the Democrats’.

Into my road-weary suitcase, I threw Jack Kerouac’s alcohol-saturated piece Big Sur. I was bound for rest and reinvigoration in the dramatic landscape of the same name along the California coast. I tossed in some Etta James CDs, a copy of The Boys on the Bus, which I was carrying everywhere to read so I could better understand campaign culture. It remained unread, as did Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. When I finally read Fear and Loathing after Thompson died, I regretted that I had not read it before doing my massive swing state-to-state with the candidates. Ironically, Thompson’s irreverent whiskey prose would have kept me from taking the press as seriously as I did.

By the time I hit the campaign trail, the press corps drank Perrier instead of whiskey and still spoke of the nightmares they’d had while undergraduates at Harvard. They were very upper middle class—kids in private schools, etc. When I look back on that time, I realize how “inside” the press strove to be. Now I understand that we’d be better off with an edgier, less “mainstream” group. Current presidential politics reveal that we need outsiders who move in unexpected ways, in unexpected places, in the world of letters and ideas. Our world is unknown and unexpected—full of surprises. To strive for comfort and the life of the bourgeoisie cuts off curiosity and mobility.

This was the age of “gotcha” journalism. An age that would make many talented people wary of getting into politics. I am told that this hypervigilance was a result of the trauma of having been too “inside” while a couple of unknown reporters from the “outside” broke the Watergate story. As I look back on the ’90s, I see that this gotcha-ism, seen as a kind of necessary cowboy mentality, was only a performance. The gotcha-ism was still about appearances. As we see from our current presidency, for all their gotcha-ism, they were still setting their sails in the wrong direction. They were still too entertained by themselves and the theatre of their punditry to know what was happening in the country.

We in the real theatre must hear this as a cautionary bell. It’s within that frame that I tell you the story of August Wilson and Robert Brustein and our trip to Town Hall.

Just as I was about to head down Highway 1, I received a message (this was before text and the proliferation of email) from Don Shirley, a columnist and critic at the Los Angeles Times. He wanted to know my opinion of the debate. Debate? I was so ensconced in the campaign and the history of presidential campaigns that I thought he was referring to the 19th-century Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Shirley’s call was about what we now refer to as “Ground”—August Wilson’s speech at the 1996 TCG conference and critic Robert Brustein’s response. I did not know about the controversy. So before returning the call, I read both speeches. In actuality, there was no debate. Rather, there was a series of monologues and a metaphorical ringside audience that sat, for the most part, in shock but passive observance.

Wilson called for greater equity in the theatre, a larger presence of blacks in the theatre, and he denounced what was then called colorblind casting or nontraditional casting. Brustein attacked many of the premises in Wilson’s speech. Wilson responded. These three monologues were published and there was much discussion. Many were shocked at Wilson’s passion. Some told me that given his stature in the theatre, it would seem that he would be “happy” or “content.” He was widely decorated (Pulitzers, Tonys, etc.). In fact, Brustein proposed that Wilson’s passionate critique of the theatre came as a result of his not getting a Tony Award that very year.

My read? Wilson’s discontent was less about his own situation and more about the situation of his race. Brustein was among those critics and scholars in the ’90s who denounced what they called “victim art.” (Some would respond by pointing out that anything that was not written by a straight white male would be in that category.)

I returned the call from the side of the road, somewhere around Salinas. “Thank you for calling me back so soon,” Shirley said. “Sure,” I said. “But I can’t talk to you about the debate because I have not spoken to either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Brustein.” Long pause. “Oh,” was the response. He seemed surprised that I wouldn’t just spout off my opinion without having attended the conference, or having spoken personally to either Wilson or Brustein.

Big Sur inspired me with an idea. I thought about one of my favorite recorded human interactions, A Rap on Race. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, had invited James Baldwin to have a long recorded conversation about race. They had never met before. They talked for hours and hours. Decades ago, I had purchased the six-record set at the American Museum of Natural History. It is a long, thrilling sharing of ideas. It ultimately breaks into a full-fledged verbal battle. [The conversation was recorded on 25 August 1970 and edited transcripts were published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. of Philadelphia in 1971.]

Intoxicated by the magnificent rock arch at Pfeiffer beach in Big Sur, I thought about the exchange which I’d first heard at the tail end of the 1970s but it always stuck in my mind. It got fiery sometimes, but often ended in a good and new perception. Take this, for example:

[Performing both parts]

Margaret Mead: What I’m trying to consider is, whether there is an inevitable difference in the spiritual stance. In your—

James Baldwin: We can’t talk about the spiritual stance unless we talk about power! I’m talking ’bout power. I am talking about that South African miner on whom the entire life of the Western world is based.

Mead: Well, I’m just sorry, because it isn’t only based on that South African miner. It’s based on miners in this country! And miners in Britain that are underground!

Baldwin: It’s the same—it’s the same principle.

Mead: It isn’t the same principal! As long as you are going to make—continually make it racial.

Baldwin: I’m not being racial!

Mead: But you are being racial! I bring—I present you—

Baldwin: Charles Dickens talked about kids being dragged through mines long before they discovered me.

Mead: That’s right. But you know we’re not having a rational conversation.

Baldwin: We’re talking about the profit motive.

Mead: We’re not— We weren’t!

[Baldwin laughs]

Mead: You said if it’s power. There’s a difference in power. So, I said okay, you reverse it, did you reverse it?

Baldwin: Look, lemme put it this way—

Mead: What I feel is this. We agree that we’re both Americans. We agree in the sense of responsibility for the present and the future. You have approached this present moment by one route and I have approached it by another. In the terms . . . in the colors of our skin you represent a . . . a course of victimization and suffering and exploitation and everything in the world—we can make any number that . . . and I represent the group . . . Now wait a minute. If you just use skin color, I represent the group that were in the ascendancy, were the conquerors, had the power, owned the land—you can say anything you like. All right. Now here we both are. Now, furthermore, however, I do not represent and I never have been a part in the whole of my life, because of the accidents of my upbringing and so forth, of the kind of psychology that would perpetuate this. You also have moved around, have lived in many parts of the world, and although you completely understand what happens here, but you have included a lot of other things in your psyche. Now is it necessary for you to . . . to narrow history, and I still want . . . to think this is a phrase . . . and express only despair or bitterness while I express hope? And is this intrinsic to our position at the moment? Or can we . . . both of us out of such a different past and such a different experience—and a contemporarily different experience because you in your own country, wherever you go, are likely to meet with insult, with indignity—

Baldwin: Danger.

Mead: Yeah. Whereas wherever I go, on the whole—if they haven’t heard me say I was in favor of marijuana—I am greeted with, on the whole, kindness. So that contemporaneously your experience and mine will continue to be different. Now, given that fact, can we both, nevertheless, stand shoulder to shoulder, a continent or an ocean away, working for the same future? Now, I think this is the real problem.

I had always wanted to see a modern rap on race, but frankly there were almost no white people around then (or now) who would speak as truthfully as relentlessly openly as Margaret Mead. Both Mead and Baldwin were in pursuit of an American truth.

“Okay,” I thought. “Gotta get Wilson and Brustein together.” Wilson had the fire of Baldwin and Brustein had the candor of Mead.

Back in Washington, D.C., my headquarters for the research on the campaign—research which would become my play House Arrest [premièred 7 November 1997 at Arena; revised version débuted at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum on 9 April 1999]—I made the calls to Brustein and Wilson. This was the perfect place to plan the convening. I lived in a 19th-century townhouse owned by a Republican congressman who was married to a liberal, Boston Brahman Democrat. We often had lively debates across party lines. There was a bumper sticker in the kitchen: “The Road to Hell Is Paved with Republicans.” In magic marker was written, “except for Amo” (Amory Houghton, the Republican Congressman). The Democrat, Priscilla Dewey Houghton, was a faithful board member of the Arena Stage, which had commissioned my play. During my stay, Priscilla had gotten papers on the history of the house, revealing that slaves had worked and lived there.

“Have you and Robert Brustein actually debated your ideas in person?” I asked Wilson.

“No.”

“Have you ever met him in person?”

“No.”

“Would you do so if I could arrange it?”

“Yeah. If you will moderate it.”

I called Robert Brustein. I asked the same question, and got the same answers, including, “Yeah. If you will moderate it.”

My original idea was to have a small event in a nice conference room at New York University, where I was going to be in residence that fall. As part of the residency, I had been asked to do some public panels, discussions, and debates. An assistant in the department that hosted me had been given the task of setting up logistics. Something went wrong in the way she approached Brustein’s office and he decided not to go forward.

I needed a Plan B. How could three monologues go down as debate—in the theatre?

I called John Sullivan, who was then executive director of TCG. The “debate,” after all, had started at a TCG conference. He was excited about this idea. He called me back and suggested that Town Hall in New York would be the perfect venue.

Town Hall?

That seemed like a much bigger event than I had in mind, but if the staff of TCG felt the idea warranted such attention…

I started doing in-depth research on both men. Somewhere close to the event itself, I was told to call the PR agency that had been hired to promote the event. A lot of excitement came from the other side of the phone. The press rep was taking bets. “Wilson will take the fight,” he said with assurance.

Ringside.

Uh. Oh.

I had not planned on a circus.

In my introductory remarks, I alluded to the conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead. But much to my dismay, neither of the two conversants had much appetite to engage in a conversation. A sinking feeling descended from my head to my throat to my stomach. Though I had stepped onstage with a healthy amount of adrenaline, my blood pressure dropped significantly.

During the intermission, TCG staffers descended upon me as if I myself were a boxer about to be eaten alive, with many notes scrawled on pieces of paper, meant to help me pick up the pace, ask provocative questions, and make the event more exciting. If memory serves me, there were also 3×5 cards with questions from the audience—headless, voiceless, presence-less questions.

Back onstage I went, resigned that I was in a different reality than the staff.

As the timer indicated that the end was coming, I asked each gentleman if they had learned anything from the other. Brustein said that he had learned that August Wilson was really a teddy bear. Wilson responded that he was, make no mistake about it, a lion. These brief last words were reported in The New York Times.

Lani Guinier, legal scholar then at Penn, now at Harvard, had come to town to see the event. I have met very few scholars who are as generous and openhearted as Lani. The next morning, she called me on the phone. “I want to help you,” she said.

Lani said I should have assembled Brustein and Wilson in a room alone, or with just a few people. “Just like that Margaret Mead/James Baldwin conversation you talked about.” What could have been a deep dive into different ideas about art and theatre was not the boxing match people thought it would be. I think the two gentlemen said all they had to say in print. In short, the onstage debate was a disaster in my view.  [The debate took place on 27 January 1997.]

A New Civil Rights Movement

My experience on the campaign trail should have prepared me for what the theatre of the event was meant to be. If 1996 was the peak of gotcha journalism, my colleagues in the theatre seemed to be after a gotcha conversation. Alas, as I look back on that era, I see that these “conversations about race”—which were often prefaced with a promise that it’d be “like a living room”—did us a disservice. I’ve been on several of those panels of the last two decades. They are simply awful. They are shouting matches where people with great verbal acuity seek to take up as much time as possible. Very little is accomplished. It’s kind of like rap music: It is a display of verbal virtuosity. The audience sits in judgment and passive observance.

What we need are events where the audience is provoked to do something.

Ringside is not where we ought to be. We ought to be in our world making a difference. That’s what we promise in mission statements and grant applications. Theatres have an opportunity to disrupt and even take down the ring; to reconstruct the position of the audience. Theatres could lead the way and pump up the health of an active citizenry.

For decades, I have been traveling around America with a tape recorder. My grandfather said, “If you say a word often enough it becomes you.” I have been trying to become America, word for word. If there are any perceptive psychiatrists in the audience, you would say that my search for American character is a healing strategy, a balm against the de facto segregation into which I was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Segregation hit me in a way that caused me to question the degree to which survival required me to lose some of my own empathic imagination. To cite Martin Buber’s I and Thou: We can have either I/it relationships where we turn persons into things, or I/thou relationships where we struggle with what I now call “the broad jump toward the other.”

The tape recorder has given me the necessary distance to come close to strangers. I tape-record people, usually about controversial events, in principle on both sides of the controversy but in reality not always. I then learn what I have recorded, word for word. I am trying to put myself in other people’s shoes by putting myself in their actual words.

I am writing a new play called Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education. [An early version of Notes ran at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre 11 July-2 August 2015; the completed play premièred at Boston’s American Repertory Theater on 20 August 2016.] It was inspired by my learning of what is often called “the school-to-prison pipeline.”

The U.S. Department of Justice released statistics revealing that poor black, brown, and Native American children are disciplined more harshly and expelled and suspended much more frequently than their middle-class brothers and sisters. These suspensions and expulsions often result in residencies in juvenile hall. As California’s Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, says, “If you are not in school, you are in trouble.”

I have been traveling in four geographic areas: Northern California (to Stockton, a bankrupt city, and further up the coast to the Yurok Indian reservation near the Oregon Border), Philadelphia, Baltimore, and most recently South Carolina, to Charleston, and all along the “Corridor of Shame,” so named because of the state of its public schools.

People say that we may be on the verge of a new civil rights movement, and Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, says it will happen at the intersection of education and law enforcement. She calls for an investment in public education and fairness in law enforcement that will be as large and as grand as the interstate highway system. Imagine that.

In the meantime, we have a public school system that is in dire need of repair, and policing looks pretty bad these days. But we cannot expect, as Obama said after the riots in Baltimore in 2015, to be able [to] fix our problem of inequality by fixing the police. The police are the front line, the guard dogs keeping the rich from the poor and vice versa.

Here are some excerpts from my play [i.e., Notes From the Field].

[Performing]

Allen Bullock
Baltimore Protester
“Big Stick”

I don’t even look the police way, tell you the truth, that’s not even me, like . . . I don’t even pay the police no mind, like, they look at me, I turn my head, I look ba—if I’m gonna look back at you, I’m not gonna mug you, I’mma just look away, you feel me? That’s all it is to—

Because, if you look at a police so hard or so straight—I don’t know, like—see how it was. You feel me? In the way, like, see, how he was [Freddie Gray], you feel me, in the way he was around this neighborhood—if the neighborhood police—they don’t care, they do not care about none of that. You—if they know you in that neighborhood, they gonna do something to—I don’t care what neighborhood you in, it could be a quiet neighborhood, anything, the police know you from . . . being bad, or not even being bad, but being around the area—anything, hangin’ with somebody that they know that’s bad? They gonna harass you, and if they gonna harass you: “Why you lookin’ at me like that?” They will ask you: “Why you lookin’ at me like that?” In a smart way, you feel me? Jump outta the car, pull their stick, all that, you feel me? I had the police ask me why am I walkin’ in the street, why am I crossin’ the street, like. “What you mean? Why am I crossin’ the street?” I’m sayin’ something back, he jettin’ out of the car, so I get back on the curb. You feel me? There’s no need for you to get out of the car and—you feel me? And talk to me. You could see why am I walkin’ across the street. They don’t say “Excuse me, sir,” “Come here,” none of that. You just ask me why am I walkin’ across the street, you feel me? It’s not late outside, it’s not none of that, so what is [it] you—I don’t know, there’s just a lot of police out here that’s . . . being police, being what they do.

Be smart, that’s what I would gotta say to you. Be smart. That’s all that’s—that’s all [there] is to it, if you know you—say if you—I don’t care what you do out there, that’s your hustle, and if you got somethin’ on you, don’t even pay the police no mind—you feel? Don’t even draw no attention, but you not doin’ nothin’, I still don’t expect for you to draw no attention to the police. Like, the police out here don’t care, even if you don’t got nothin’ on you! Why look at the police, you ain’t got no—why mug the police, you feel me? No reason at all, so, I wouldn’t even pay the police no mind, I don’t pay the police out here no mind. They mug me all day, I don’t care about none of that—they doin’, like, I see ’em, you feel me, like, I don’t say too much stuff, the police and all that, like for no reason at all, like, I’m just sayin’ that like. I’m out in these streets.

[I got beat]—it only happen—it happen ’bout four times, four times, that’s what I remember, four times. You can’t protect yourself! When it come to the police, you can’t say too much, but run your mouth and once you—once they see you really runnin’ your mouth, they try catch you or try do something to you. And especially if they ain’t got no reason, you feel me, to touch you, they definitely won’t touch you, like, they chase you, all this, and you ain’t got nothing on you, and they just chasin’ you? Man, they—they worth it—gonna make it worth they while, they gonna find—they gonna not even put nothin’ on you, they gonna beat you. Straight like that, it ain’t no, “Oh, I’mma plant something on him,” they just do [what] they wanna do, at that time, at that moment.

It don’t—it don’t even matter this—at this point. It don’t—it don’t even matter if they black or white. I never—I don’t even—it ain’t no black or white situation. I ain’t tryin’ to hear that. I seen plenty of black officers do it, and I’m black, you feel me, to black people. And I seen plenty of white police do it. And I done seen ’em do it together. It ain’t no—no racist thing, if that’s what I—I don’t see no racist thing comin’ into play. I think it’s a hatred thing. Like, they hate, you feel me, like, if I ca—if you can’t find nothing on me, what’s the whole point of you lockin’ me up, or you beatin’ me up, you feel me? For no reason. Cause I made you run? Come on now, like, you train to do this, like. Stuff happen every day in Baltimore City.

I don’t know, like the hood police be hatin’. Like, they just a hateful—they just hateful people, like. They could see you have a couple of dollars in your hand, no drugs, no nothin’, just a couple of dollars, and think you doin’ wrong. You don’t know me, I work! So what are you sayin’, like. But you pullin’ me over, ask where my money come from. You don’t got no right to ask me where my money comin’ from. You don’t got no right to check me, you feel me. Like, you don’t have no warrant, no nothin’. To put your hands on me, period, but hey, they do it. I don’t fuss with you over nothin’ like that. I know you the police and you gonna do what you want, regardless. And you got a big stick, so. So, hey.

James Baldwin
From A Rap On Race
By Margaret Mead and James Baldwin
“Walk on a Leaf” 

Somebody said, Allen Ginsberg said, “Don’t call a cop a pig. Call him a friend. You call him a friend, he’ll act like a friend.” I know more about cops than that. What I do know—what I do know—is that I do not like to be corralled. I don’t like being a subject nation. That I do know. And I don’t care how well the cops are educated! I know what their role is in my life! And I will not accept it. I know that my situation cannot be endured. It cannot be endured.

And if I turn into a monster by trying to change it, that is something, a risk, my soul will have to take. I’m not being objective. I’m trying to say this: We been talking about time present, time past. According to the West I have no history. I’ve had to wrest my identity out of the jaws of the West. We did that on a famous day in Washington. I was there. And do you know the answer we got? Two weeks later? Ten days later? Out of that enormous petition? Know the first answer that the Republic gave us? My phone rang one morning. I was back in Hollywood, God knows why. And a CORE worker was telling me—she could hardly talk—that four black girls had been bombed into eternity in a Sunday school in Birmingham. That was the answer the Republic gave! The Republic includes you, includes me too. You are responsible. I am responsible.

It doesn’t matter what one tries. God knows, you know . . . I—I’m not the least interested in carrying on the nightmare. Nevertheless, if I don’t, I, Jimmy, don’t accept the very brutal fact, which is not extraordinary, it’s happened to everybody else in the world, too, but if I pretend that it did not happen to me, that I was not there, then I cannot live. I—I’m not talking about . . . I’m not talking about going back. Nobody—nobody can, anyway. But the past is the present, my situation is—our situation, really—my situation presents itself to me as exceedingly urgent. I cannot lie to myself about some things. I cannot—I don’t mean anybody else here. I mean that I have to know something about myself and my countrymen. The most terrible thing about it is not the lootings, the fires, or the burnings, the bombings; that’s bad enough. What is really terrible—is to face the fact that you cannot trust your countrymen. That you cannot trust them. For the assumptions under which they live, are antithetical to any hope you may have to live. It is a terrible omen when you see an American flag on somebody’s car and realize that’s your enemy. In principle, it’s your flag, too.

If I, Jimmy, really offend you, Margaret, and I pretend I haven’t, I have sealed my life off from all life, all light and all air. I will not get past my crime if I pretend I did not. If I have offended you, then I have to come to you and say, “I’m sorry, please forgive me.” I’m only talking about that, and if I can’t do that, then I cannot live. I don’t mean I have a bill to pay back. We are living in a kind of theology. You are identified with the angels. I’m identified with the devil. That’s what I mean by history being present.

Luckily, I’m not 15, but if I were, how in the world would I achieve any respect for human life, or any sense of history? What I’m trying to say is that if I were young, I would find myself with no models. That’s a very crucial situation. When you consider what we have done! Our generation! The world that we’ve created. If I was 15, I would feel hopeless too! You see what one’s gotta do is try to face…what I’m trying to get at, is . . . I read a little book called The Way It Spozed to Be [James Herndon; Simon and Schuster, 1968]. And it was poetry and things written by little black children, Mexican, Puerto Rican children, various schools in—land of free and the home of the brave. And the teacher, he made a compilation of the poetry that his kids wrote. He dealt with them as though they were in fact, as in fact all children are—all human beings are—a kind of miracle! And for that very tiny book, about 30 pages long, one boy wrote a poem. Sixteen years old. He was in prison. It ended—four lines I never will forget. “Walk on water, walk on a leaf. Hardest of all is walk in grief.”

What I’m getting at, I hope, is that there is a tremendous national, moral, global waste. And the question is: How can it be arrested? That’s an enormous question. Look. You and I are both whatever we have become. Curtain will come down eventually. But! What should we do about the children? We are responsible, in so far as we’re responsible at all, we are responsible for the future of this world.

Congressman John Lewis
U.S. Representative
“Brother”

On our way. On this trip that we been takin’ for the past 13 years. I been going back every year since 1965. Back to Selma. To commemorate the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, that took place on March 7, 1965. But we usually stop in Birmingham for a day. And then we go to Montgomery for a day. And then we go Selma.

But on this trip, to Montgomery, we stopped at First Baptist Church, the church that was pastored by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. It’s the same church where I met the Dr. Martin Luther King and the Reverend Abernathy. In the spring of 1958.

Young police officer—the chief—the chief came to the church to speak on behalf of the mayor that was not available. And he gave a very movin’ speech to the audience. The church was full. Black. White. Latino. Asian American. Members of Congress. Staffers. Family members, children and grandchildren. And he said, “What happened in Montgomery 52 years ago durin’ the freedom ride was not right,” he said. “Fifty-two years ago was not right. The police department didn’t show up. They allowed a angry mob to come and beat you,” and he said, “Congressman! I’m sorry for what happened. I want to apologize. This is not the Montgomery that we want Montgomery to be. This is not the police department that I want to be the chief of. Before any officers are hired,” he said, “they go through trainin’.

They have to study the life of Rosa Parks. The life of Martin Luther King Jr. They have to visit the historic sites of the movement. They have to know what happened in Birmingham and what happened in Montgomery and what happened in Selma.” He said, “I want you to forgive us.” He said, “To show the respect that I have for you and for the movement I want to take off my badge and give it to you.”

And the church was so quiet. No one sayin’ a word. And I stood up to accept the badge. And I started cryin’. And everybody in the church started cryin’. There was not a dry eye in the church.

And I said, “Officer. Chief. I cannot accept your badge. I’m not worthy to accept your badge. Don’t you need it?”

He said, “Congressman Lewis, I can get another one. I want you to have my badge.”

And I took it. And I will hold on to it forever. But he hugged me. I hugged him. I cried some more. And you had Democrats and Republicans in the church. Cryin’. And his young deputy assistant. A young African American. Was sittin’ down. He couldn’t stand. He cried so much, like a baby, really.

It was the first time that a police chief in any city where I visited or where I got arrested durin’ the ’60s ever apologized, or where I was beaten. Or where I was beaten. It was a moment of grace. It was a moment of reconciliation. [The Chief] was very young, he was not even born 52 years ago. So he was offerin’ an apology and to be forgiven on behalf of his associates, his colleagues of the past.

[It’s a moment of grace.] It means that sufferin’ and the pain that many of the people have suffered have been redeemed.

And then for the police officer, the chief, to come and apologize. To ask to be forgiven. It—it felt so good, and at the same time so freein’ and liberatin’. To have this young man come up. He hugged me and held me. I felt like, you know, I’m not worthy. You know, I’m just one. But many people were beaten.

It is amazing grace. You know the line in there, “Saved a wretch like me”? In a sense, it’s saying that we all have fallen short! Cause we all just tryin’ to just make it! We all searching! As Dr. King said, we were out to redeem the soul of America. But we first have to redeem ourselves.

This message. This act of grace of the badge says to me, “Hold on.” And, “Never give up. Never give in.” “Never lose faith. Keep the faith.”

Even in this day and age for a city like Montgomery. For this young man, somethin’ moved him. And it takes what I call raw courage. To go with the spirit. To go with his heart. His soul. He’s a very, he’s really a very interestin’ man. I been thinking about callin’ him. “How ya doin’?”

The only time somethin’ happened like this before was a member of the Klan from Rock Hill, South Carolina, that beat me and my seatmate. On May 9, 1961, durin’ the Freedom Ride. He came here to this office in February ’09. His son had been encouraging his father to seek out the people he had wronged.

And he came in the office and said, “Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people that beat you on May 9, 1961. I want to apologize.” He said, “Will you forgive me?”

I said, “I forgive you. I accept your apology.”

His son started cryin’. He started cryin’. I started cryin’. He hugged me. I hugged him. His son hugged me. And since that time, I seen this guy four times since then.

He called me “brother.” And I call him “brother.”

[The event Congressman Lewis describe above occurred on 2 March 2013.  The police chief was Kevin Murphy, 50.]

We stop the show in the middle of the play. I know my limitations. And I know that there are people in the audience who can make a real difference. We divide the audience up into small groups of 20 and send them off for facilitated conversations. They talk about the performance, but they make commitments about what they are going to do.

Thank you to Berkeley Rep and the American Repertory Theater for working with me on the first experiment that we call the Second Act. It is challenging, and Berkeley and ART went for it, logistics and all.

I want someone somewhere in the audience of Notes From the Field to do something to break the school-to-prison pipeline and/or ignite the new civil rights movement.

The Ground on Which “We” Stand? 

“Ground,” as Wilson’s speech is now called, is “The Ground on Which I Stand.” I see and hear it referred to as “The Ground on Which We Stand.”

Wilson was a “race man,” as we blacks who fought for the race are called. He proudly carried the blood-stained banner of black struggle. From the point of view of his “I,” some among us were moved, others motivated, others outraged, others frightened, others perplexed, others full of guilt.

In 1996 and after, many of you stood in relationship to Wilson’s ground.

Those of us who were moved, are moved, must move.

So an action, a move-ment, requires as many movers, shakers and seekers as it can attract.

Our ground seems to me to be very complex.

We all meet here with different histories, different banners of struggle, and we meet at different junctures in our histories. We are a map with some intersecting points and many straying lines in search of connection. Most of us want to board the train toward progress, equity, self-fulfillment, helping fulfill the lives of others, toward protecting all living beings and natural resources. And toward love.

I have now visited the Island of Gorée in Senegal. The holding pens where many Africans were held before being put into the bowels of slave ships and sent to this country.

But before my forefathers got here, Native Americans were on this ground. Many of them, too, were transported from their homeland to another place. The Trail of Tears. A national disgrace. Some now live on fractured lands, among fractured lives and disrupted joys; sometimes in beautiful surroundings, sometimes not. Their youth have, statistics tell us, an epidemic of suicide, despair, and depression. I was welcomed to the river on the Yurok reservation in Northern California. I found myself saturated by their history, their dances, their modern struggle against poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, teen suicide, and violence.

Trump promised a wall. When I was doing research for my play Twilight: Los Angeles, journalist/musician Rubén Martínez told me that that no wall will hold Mexicans back, because it is not only jobs that they seek. They seek their homeland. After all, some Mexicans are pulled by deep ancestral forces. They believe that California is Mexico.

Migration is human history. Migration is human present and human future. Those who came in a variety of migrations from Asia. A variety of migrations from Europe, throughout American history, running from genocides or poverty or dogmas. We would not have imagined the profound otherness of Muslims 20 years ago.

Our ground is complex because 20 years have passed since Wilson/Brustein nailed their edicts to the pages of American Theatre.

Wilson/Brustein was before:

9/11. Which burst our world open in all ways, and certainly in racial ways.

The iPhone. Which has connected us around the world, in ways that both foster brother and sisterhood and threaten to bring us closer to evil.

Google Maps.

Spotify.

SoulCycle.

High school students, primarily Latino, staging walkouts in Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities, boycotting schools and businesses in support of immigrant rights and equality.

“Black-ish.”

Shonda Rhimes.

Mainstreaming of the TED conference. Mainstreaming of TEDx.

The proliferation of places and journals that gather free content and charge money for the public to access it.

A sitting U.S. president visited a federal penitentiary (Obama). A sitting U.S. president visited an Indian reservation (Obama).

Jeremy Lin became the first American born NBA player to be of Chinese/Taiwanese descent.

Minutemen Project, with its civilians, took it upon themselves to sit down at the Mexican-American border in their version of a neighborhood watch.

“The West Wing” television show.

Reality television.

The term “white privilege” moved from primarily academic circles to mainstream parlance.

Rashes of violence reached the peak that is sweeping us now.

Orlando. Which happened just shy of the one-year memorial of the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston South Carolina.

The first black president.

Expectation of a potential first woman president.

Donald Trump.

Caitlyn Jenner.

Black Lives Matter.

Hamilton. Imagine a conversation between Lin-Manuel Miranda, Wilson, and Brustein. What would Wilson or Brustein think of a Latino playing Alexander Hamilton, translating a white man’s book? Or a black man playing Aaron Burr?

The Ground on Which the American Theatre Stands Is Not Just

Theatres are convening places. Communities need them, our country needs them, the world needs them. But some communities do not have this experience in their schools or inside of theatre buildings.

Many of us in this room are concerned, even horrified, by the growing gap between rich and poor in this country. Many of us want to do something about inequality. Our mission statements and grants applications make us sound as though we are world renewal projects, projects that would lead to the betterment of mankind. But let’s look in the mirror.

The DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland released a report. Many of you know of it. There was controversy surrounding its release. To my eye, it gives valuable history and statistics. Among them:

The highest reported compensation for leaders in mainstream theatres is $605,361. The median is $388,812. The lowest is $316,134.

The highest reported compensation for a leader at a Latino theatre is $88,539. The median is $51,298. The lowest is $9,970.

The highest compensation for a leader in African-American theatre is $110,000. The median is $62,692. The lowest is $29,408.

What shall we do about our problematic statistics? Who is welcome in leadership roles? What kinds of theatres are welcome in communities and in this country? What kind of artists are radically welcomed? To whom is hospitality extended?

The theatre does not exist in a vacuum. Scholars of contemporary theatre look at the ’80s and point to a severe decline in smaller arts groups. Some say survival required a corporate attitude on boards. Alisa Solomon wrote a deeply researched article in the Village Voice in December 1992, titled “Identity Crisis: Can the Arts Survive Capitalism?” She quoted one director who said, “In the ’70s, when you went to meet a funder it was enough to wear a suit. But in the ’80s, the whole organization had to be dressed like Wall Street.”

Our situation now needs different and new economics. How can we say in our mission statements and grant applications that we support and perpetuate the best in human instincts and live with the inequality that is so evident in the arts?

Take what was learned by figuring out how to increase square footage and increase the wages of actors, designers, and other artists. We can no longer assume that people are willing to starve for the theatre. We lose them to other professions in the entertainment industry and we lose out on talent who would never dare try because the economy is so bad.

Perhaps we should combine our forces. Invest in some large facilities in which a diverse group of people with diverse missions can share administrative costs, share rent costs, share the responsibility for making a healthy endowment, share the development plan, and potentially share and crisscross audiences. By diverse I include those who announce themselves as the white privileged as well as the other cultures sometimes considered marginal. And though I’d like to see work that is activist and dedicated to social justice, I am not a snob. (I myself just played Hawkwoman’s past life on “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.”) Artistic experimentation would be the goal. Artistic innovation. Economic innovation. Leadership innovation. Developing skills for new leaders and new artists would be the goal. Revealing more about the grounds on which we stand would be the goal.

We find ourselves in the midst of an economic, security, and moral crisis. In the arts, we cannot save the world, we cannot teach reading and math through drama, music and dance, but we can prick and instigate the growth of the public moral imagination. Develop a radical welcome.

The idea of a radical welcome comes from the Christian church. To quote: “Radical welcome is first and foremost a spiritual practice. It combines the Christian ministry of welcome and hospitality with a faithful commitment to doing the theological, spiritual and systemic work to eliminate historic, systemic barriers that limit the genuine embrace of groups generally marginalized in mainline churches (young adults, the poor, LGBT people, people of color, people with disabilities).”

Develop a spirit of hospitality, of radical hospitality. As Derrida wrote [Of Hospitality; Stanford University Press, 2000]:

Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.

Develop a radical hospitality towards one another and toward the global public on whose ground we stand.

Thank you.