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.”
On 3 May 2020, the Lucille Lortel Awards organization announced the recipients of the 35th Annual Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Achievement Off-Broadway. Among the awardees was Anna Deavere Smith as the Playwrights’ Sidewalk Inductee.
ReplyDeleteAs one of her last projects, Lucille Lortel wanted to create a permanent tribute to international playwrights whose work has been performed Off-Broadway. On 26 October 1998, she unveiled the Playwrights' Sidewalk at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. As part of the Lucille Lortel Awards ceremony each year, one playwright is inducted into the sidewalk, having her or his name engraved into one of the solid bronze stars embedded in black concrete in front of the theater on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
Lortel Awards nominations also went to the Signature Theatre's 'Fires in the Mirror' for Outstanding Revival, Alan C. Edwards for Outstanding Lighting Design for 'Fires in the Mirror,' and Hannah Wasileski for Outstanding Projection Design for 'Fires in the Mirror.'
On 19 June 2020 (Juneteenth), the inaugural presentation of the Antonyo Awards, given by the Broadway Black organization. (Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the awards were made virtually; there was no live presentation.)
ReplyDeleteMichael Benjamin Washington won the first Antonyo Award for Best Solo Performance for his performance in the Signature Theatre's 2019 revival of Anna Deavere Smith's 'Fires in the Mirror.'
~R
One of the problems with political theater—or socio-political theater—is that it often ages quickly and may consequently be diminished in revival.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Wonder if this is why we don't see that much revival of Brecht's Mother Courages, the Caucasian Chalk Circle, etc. Although you have to read Brecht in almost every drama school
I suspect the actual reason Brecht's plays are less often revived than those of some other writers is that Brecht isn't easy to stage.
DeleteOn the other hand, I don't think 'Mother Courage' and 'Caucasian Chalk Circle' are that rare on U.S. stages. Like Molière and Chekhov, though, Brecht is more popular with actors and directors than with general audiences.
~Rick