'The Young Man from Atlanta' (Signature Theatre Company)

I saw the Broadway début of The Young Man from Atlanta with Rip Torn and Shirley Knight in March 1997, but when I saw the current revival at the Signature Theatre Company, I found I didn’t remember the play as well as I thought.  For instance, I didn’t remember it as a depressing, disheartening play—that’s not how I think of Horton Foote (1916-2009).  Sentimental, yes, and with a romanticized vision in this rear-view; poignant, perhaps, and even heartbreaking at moments—but not depressing.  I said after the performance that maybe that’s because when I saw it 22 years ago, I wasn’t 72 and most of my family hadn’t died yet.  As things are now, the play kept bringing me waaay down!

(I had other trouble with my memory with regard to the play.  I remembered seeing the Broadway production—I didn’t look it up, though I meant to—but, first, I thought it had been the play’s première.  It wasn’t: it premièred at Signature in 1995, then played in regional rep houses before returning for a commercial run in New York City.  Second, I thought I’d seen it in the ’80s, not the late ’90s.  I was off by 10 years or more!)

The world première of The Young Man from Atlanta took place from 27 January to 26 February 1995 during the Signature Theatre’s 1994-95 Horton Foote season at the Kampo Cultural Center (31 Bond Street in the East Village).  The production was directed by Peter Masterson with Ralph Waite as Will Kidder and Carlin Glynn as Lily Dale; it won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Foote.

Regional productions were staged by the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, Massachusetts, from 20 October to 19 November 1995; the Alley Theatre in Houston (where the play was developed and had readings) from 16 February to 16 March 1996; and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago from 27 January to 1 March 1997.  That last staging starred Rip Torn and Shirley Knight as the Kidders, directed by Robert Falls, the Goodman’s artistic director.  It was this cast that came to Broadway later that year.

Though there had been publicized talk of bringing back the cast from the Signature début for the Broadway première, the producers decided that some changes need to be made to the pay, so a new director and cast were engaged for the New York transfer, and Falls, Torn, Knight, and the Goodman company were selected.  The production ran at the Longacre Theatre from 27 March to 8 June 1997, and though it lasted only 17 previews and 84 regular performances, received 1997 Tony nominations for Best Play, Best Actress In A Play (Knight), and Best Featured Actor In A Play (William Biff McGuire as Pete Davenport), and a 1997 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress In A Play (Knight).

The play text is published by Penguin (1996) in a single edition and in the Northwestern University Press collection Three Plays: Dividing the Estate, The Trip to Bountiful, and The Young Man from Atlanta (2009).  An “acting edition” (1995) of the script is available from the Dramatists Play Service.  There’s no video of Young Man, but an audio recording is available.  The unabridged reading, which stars Shirley Knight and David Selby, was released in 1999 by L.A. Theater Works and can be downloaded from http://www.audible.com or purchased through online or local booksellers. 

The STC revival, the first in New York City since the 1997 Broadway run, began previews in the Irene Diamond Stage, the large, 294-seat proscenium house at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row, on 5 November 2019; it opened to the press on 24 November.  Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 6 December; the production closed on December 15 (after a week’s extension beyond its originally-scheduled final performance on 8 December).

Directed by Michael Wilson (who previously helmed Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle, 2009-10, and The Old Friends, 2013, for STC, as well as Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, 2015; and the Acting Company’s Desire, 2015, at 59E59 and Foote’s The Roads to Home, 2016, at the Cherry Lane—all of which I saw and on which I reported on Rick On Theater) and running two hours and five minutes (with one intermission), the STC version of Young Man has lost one character (Miss Lacey—whose role I don’t even recall!). 

In Young Man, Foote brought back characters who’d been seen in his monumental three-evening, nine-play Orphans’ Home Cycle (see my report on 25 and 28 February 2010).  Will Kidder was in his early 20’s in Lily Dale, and approaching middle age in Cousins.  Lily Dale Kidder was introduced in Roots in a Parched Ground as a 10-year-old, and was portrayed in subsequent life stages in Lily Dale and Cousins.  Her stepfather, 78-year-old Pete Davenport, first appears at age thirty in Roots in a Parched Ground.  According to the playwright, he thought he was done with these characters after Cousins, but in the early 1990s found himself thinking about them again and started work on this play.

In Houston in the spring of 1950, Will Kidder, age 61 (Aiden Quinn, back on stage for the first time after seven seasons on CBS’s Elementary), is in his office at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery, where he has worked since his early 20’s.  He reveals that he’s been diagnosed with a slight heart condition.  Will and his wife, Lily Dale, have just moved into their new house and, as Will tells Tom Jackson (Dan Bittner), the young man Will hired and trained (as he keeps mentioning), “There’s no finer house in Houston.”  He was poor as a child and made a successful career and now insists on only “the biggest and best.”  He’s sunk $200,000 (equivalent to $2.1 million in 2019) in the new house and has put a down payment on a new car as a gift for Lily Dale. 

Will, then, is shocked when his boss, Ted Cleveland, Jr. (Devon Abner, the only cast member who appeared in the 1995 première, playing Tom Jackson), the son of the man Will came to work at Sunshine for, fires him to make room for newer blood.  (If you guess it’s Tom whom Will is pushed aside to make room for, you get a gold star.  Tom, at least, has the consideration to tell Will himself that he’s the one.)  Will announces that he plans to start his own business and contacts local banks to secure loans for the venture; the banks—with whom he’d been doing business for years—aren’t encouraging.

Will talks about his only son, Bill, who had moved to Atlanta.  Bill drowned six months ago at 37, and Will suspects Bill actually committed suicide.  The young man couldn’t swim, yet he walked out into a lake in Florida until the water was over his head.  Lily Dale (Kristine Nielsen), Will’s wife and Bill’s mother, refuses to consider such a possibility, instead believing that his death was an accident.  Bill’s roommate, Randy Carter, the “Young Man from Atlanta” (whom we never see) has come to Houston from Atlanta to try to see Will, who believes that all he wants is money. 

(Is it a coincidence that Tennessee Williams wrote a play in 1937 in which a character commits suicide in a way that’s remarkably similar to Bill Kidder’s death in Foote’s Young Man?  The play is called Escape or, in a 2004 New York staging, Summer at the Lake, and was a precursor to The Glass Menagerie; a review of “Five by Tenn,” a bill of one-acts first staged in 2004 which included Escape, was posted on ROT on 5 March 2011.  The suicide-by-drowning was a reference to the suicide death of Williams’s literary hero, poet Hart Crane.  Both Williams and Crane were gay men.)

Lily Dale’s widowed step-father, 78-year-old Pete Davenport (Stephen Payne), lives with the Kidders and he’s being visited by another young man from Atlanta, his 27-year-old great-nephew Carson (Jonny Orsini), who just happens to have lived in the same boarding house as Randy and Bill (and is now staying at the same Houston YMCA where Randy is staying).   Will asks both Lily Dale and Pete for loans to help him launch his new company, but he learns that Lily Dale had given Randy $35,000 (about $375,000 today)—and Bill had given him $100.000 (over $1 million)—all unbeknownst to Will, and he becomes very angry.  He suffers a heart attack and his doctor is summoned. 

Eventually Will insists to Lily Dale that “there was a Bill I knew and a Bill you knew and that’s the only Bill I care to know about.”  The thrust of Foote’s play is the question, ‘What is truth?’  Is it what Will believes?  What Lily Dale believes?  What Randy says?  What Carson says?  The two young men accuse each other of being notorious liars.  Who was Bill really?  He was unathletic, despite his father’s efforts, and a math whizz who moved away from home and only worked menial jobs.  Who is Randy?  Who is Carson?  (Is he even actually Pete’s great-nephew?)

What was the relationship among the three young men from Atlanta?   There are broad hints—on which no one elaborates—that Bill and Randy, who’s 10 years younger than Bill, were gay and lovers.  A review of the 1995 première of Young Man in The New York Times  pointed out: “This being 1950, nobody in the play mentions the word ‘gay,’ or refers even euphemistically to the truth of the relationship between Bill and Randy.”  Was Carson also in love with Bill and jealous of Randy?  We never know, and neither Will nor Lily Dale wants to find out.  As Will tells his wife, he refuses to meet with Randy because “there are things I’d have to ask him and I don’t want to know the answers.”

Threaded throughout the play is Lily Dale’s nearly obsessive quest to confirm the rumors she’d heard of a “Disappointment Club” in Houston during the war.  According to Lily Dale, the club was a conspiracy by Houston’s African-American domestic workers to disappoint their white employers by not showing up on the first day of work.  The rumors say that the clubs were started by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt because she hated Texas.  The apocryphal Disappointment Club is a metaphor for Foote’s theme.  As the New York Times’ Ben Branltey put it, there is a Disappointment Club “though not the kind that Lily Dale imagines.  Everyone in Foote’s plays is a dues-paying member of such a club.  Life according to Foote . . . has a way of letting down and stranding people, and it makes no exceptions.”

The performances in Signature’s revival of The Young Man from Atlanta were all right, but not as good as most I see at Signature.  The only actor whose name I knew (or whom I recognized) was Aiden Quinn, who played Will, and he had line problems.  He even went up in the first scene and his partner had to bail him out!  Later, he bobbled a couple of lines.

Other members of the cast either seemed under-energized—Jonny Orsini even seemed to be playing at his character (Carson), rather than “playing” him (if that makes sense).  Some of the others were the opposite (such as Kristine Nielsen as Lily Dale)—chewing scenery.  The steadiest performances came from Stephen Payne, whose Pete Davenport managed to be both level-headed and reasonable while still suggesting his powers of discernment might be slipping; Harriett D. Foy as Clara, the Kidders supportive and indulgent housekeeper and cook and Lily Dale’s confidante; and Pat Bowie’s Etta Doris, an ancient and sweet-souled former household employee who drops by for a visit.

Director Michael Wilson isn’t a novice, and he’s done some nice Horton Footes before, including at the Signature where I enjoyed the work immensely—especially the monumental Orphans’ Home Cycle (the three-part, nine-play series of one-acts that told the story of Foote’s father’s family that impressed me a whole lot) and The Good Friends.  This production seemed slipshod.  The general softness of the character portrayals, either vague or noncommittal, has to be the responsibility of the director.  The whole production seemed to need tightening and tuning and Wilson seems not to have effected any.

I have to say that this lack of oversight extended to the scenic design of Jeff Cowie, too.  The first scene takes place in the office of Will Kidder, and it’s represented by some stand-alone furniture pieces and a large billboard for the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery.  There are no walls, doors, or windows—and that’s fine.  But then the rest of the play is set in the living room of the Kidders elaborate new house. 

Now, Cowie’s living room set design is also workable—but his imaginary layout of the rest of the house is confounding.  Any time someone leaves the living room, I wondered where the hell he or she was going.  Where’s the front door?  The kitchen?  The Kidders’ bedroom?  It took me a couple of departures to realize that there’s a large interior courtyard outside the upstage wall—suggesting that the house is a sort of square donut.  What’s the point in devising a set plan that confuses the spectator?  It doesn’t help the plot to do that?  So why?  Just because you think it’s clever?

(I was not the only observer who was bothered by this.  Samuel L. Leiter of Theatre’s Leiter Side wrote:

Jeff Cowie’s set . . . provides an architecturally odd impression of the Kidders’ new home.  It’s placed against neutral black curtains at either side, with a substantial window in the upstage wall, beneath which runs a slightly raised platform, with doors up several steps at either side.

Characters enter and leave via the sides, as well as through the [two upstage] doors, even going out one door and entering through the other despite being separated by an exterior yard seen through the window.  At one point we even see two characters walking across the yard as they go from one room to another.  Whatever the explanation for this arrangement, it’s definitely distracting.)

Van Broughton Ramsey’s costumes and David Lander’s lighting are both effective without being assertive.  Dialect coach Shane Ann Younts did a good job keeping everyone sounding as if they come  from the same places—the Houstonians with their Texas twangs and the Atlantans with their Georgia drawls.  (Nielsen is outstanding in creating a vocal characterization—not just an accent, but a whole persona through her voice.  Lily Dale constantly calls Will “Daddy”—which is a little creepy, but that’s Foote’s doing—and Nielsen conjures up a whole world when she speaks that one word!)

As ROTters know by now, there are no longer the stats I used to cite from the website Show-Score, so I’ll get right down to the critical response to STC’s revival of The Young Man from Atlanta.  I’ve selected 15 published reviews from both the print and on-line press coverage. 

Only two dailies reviewed the production, the Times and the Wall Street Journal.  WSJ’s Terry Teachout described the STC production as “as good as it can possibly be” and asserted that it “makes clear the play’s surpassing excellence.”  Teachout characterized the play as “a study in disappointment,” noting all the tribulations that beset Will Kidder (who could be president of Foote’s Disappointment Club) at the height of America’s post-war prosperity.  The WSJ reviewer stated that theatergoers would “not [be] wrong to think” that Foote had written a well-made play, but pointed out that the playwright’s “interest, rather, is in people like Will.” 

The review-writer explained that “the whole point of Mr. Foote’s story is in the telling.  He is, like Thornton Wilder before him, a playwright who believes devoutly in the significance of “the smallest events in our daily life.”  Director Wilson “creates the uncanny illusion that we are not seeing a play performed but watching life unfold before our eyes,” for which Teachout also credited the cast and design team “who make every moment in ‘The Young Man From Atlanta’ seem natural and believable.”  He singled out Aiden Quinn whose performance “is so true to life as to make disbelief impossible:  You’ve known him, and even if you haven’t, you’ll still feel as if you have.”

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley dubbed the production “an affectionate, slow and steady revival” of Foote’s play and calls the playwright “one of the theater’s great chroniclers of dispossession and denial.”  Brantley asserted, “By rights, [Foote’s] worldview should be deeply depressing.  But the work of Foote is usually as funny as it [is] sad.”  (Somehow, I didn’t find Young Man so.  I found it aligned more with Brantley’s next statement.)  “Superficially, his sturdily built, naturalistic plays are soothingly old fashioned,” the Timesman noted. “Yet the perspective that infuses them is as bleak as anything from those greatest of theatrical modernists, Beckett and Chekhov.”  (A somewhat hyperbolic comparison, I think.) 

Brantley made an analogy many of his colleagues also made: “As embodied with affecting understatement by Quinn, this Will emerges as a spiritual cousin to Willy Loman” of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  (Like Brantley’s comparisons of Foote to Beckett and Chekhov, this match-up is a little overstated as Will Kidder lacks the depth and poetry of Loman.)  In the first half of the play, Brantley reported, “the show is engaging but not enthralling” as Wilson has his cast “bank their fires”; then “the reticence pays off” in the second half. 

Joe Westerfield labeled STC’s Young Man “a touching and funny revival” in Newsweek, giving the lie to the bromide “The truth will set you free.”  Westfield made another comparison with a world-class writer: the Kidders, he said, “are in such denial about so many things that with more of a taste for rotgut whiskey or morphine, they could easily fit into one of Eugene O’Neill’s later plays.”  (He also makes the connection between Will Kidder and Willy Loman.)  The Newsweek writer found, “The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent” and singled out Quinn (who “has morphed from a romantic lead into a solid character actor”) and Nielsen (who “show[s] a tender, vulnerable side to a character who could, in lesser hands seem just vapid” and “is also funny.”  Westerfield concluded by reporting that “Young Man From Atlanta shows Foote at the top of his game.”

“Even the most fervent Horton Foote fan might be hard-pressed to explain the appeal, much less the Pulitzer Prize, of The Young Man From Atlanta,” contemplated Time Out New York’s Melissa Rose Bernardo in the opening of her notice.  “The playwright was renowned for his delicate, layered storytelling, but this 1995 drama lays it on thick.”  Bernardo characterized the STC revival as “an often shaky piece” and noted that actor Stephen Payne as Pete Davenport “looks uncomfortable in even his best moments.”  Director Wilson “at least gives this head-scratcher of a play a handsome production at the Signature, with a couple of inspired touches.” 

Constance Rodgers wrote on New York Theatre Guide that Signature’s Young Man from Atlanta “is lovingly brought to life again” and “immerses us in the quietly desperate lives of Will and Lily Dale Kidder” “with respectful humor” by Wilson’s directing.  “[I]ngeniously written,” Young Man “is old fashioned in style and characterization and that is perfect.”  Quinn and Nielsen “are touching and hilarious” and the STC revival makes a “wonderful evening of old fashioned theater that does not feel old fashioned, just honest and funny.”

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, after a long preamble, Samuel L. Leiter complains that “it’s hard to see from this production [of The Young Man from Atlanta] what might have inspired its receipt of a Pulitzer Prize.”  Leiter went on to explain, “Enjoyable as some of it is, the writing is unmistakably old-fashioned, melodramatic, even, dependent on lengthy, over-obvious exposition, and burdened by an unsatisfying, almost perfunctory resolution.”  The TLS blogger added that “the production often suffers from overacting” and, as I pointed out earlier, Leiter found that the “scene design . . . serves more to confuse than to illuminate the topography of the dramatic locale.” 

Leiter felt that “the play fails to coalesce convincingly” and while the “secondary roles are all decently played,” Quinn “is uneven, ranging from superficially anguished to artificially blustery” and Nielsen “has fewer convincing moments, being unable to meld her familiar flibbertigibbet mannerisms with a realistic portrait of Lily Dale that goes beyond making her a perpetual airhead”; Payne as Pete “is simply colorless.”  Leiter ends by lamenting, “Given the Signature’s devotion to Horton Foote . . . it’s disappointing to see a less-than-superior production of his sole Pulitzer-winning work.” 

“Questions of mortality and regret hover over this sturdy revival” of The Young Man from Atlanta, wrote Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania.  “For all its flaws,” continued Stewart, “it still presents a compelling portrait of the willful ignorance that is a prerequisite for the American dream.”  With a cast the TM reviewer lauded, Stewart reported, “Michael Wilson directs a solid production undergirded by smart design.”  Despite this, however, Young Man “feels like a low-stakes affair.” 

Theater News Online isn’t a site I usually consult, but I spotted that its review of The Young Man from Atlanta was by a sort of old friend from whom I haven’t heard in quite a while: Joe Dziemianowicz, who used to review for the New York Daily News (which seems to have ceased covering theater).  So I decided to include Dziemianowicz’s short notice in my round-up.  He characterized STC’s Young Man as “a starry but unpersuasive revival” as it “leaves you wanting—and wondering.”  Dziemianowicz asserted that “the saga clunks along more than it clicks,” adding that “Foote’s folksy plainspokenness tolls, and the quietly eloquent grace notes that tug you in are scarce.”  He blames Wilson’s “stiff and at times unwieldy staging.”  The TNO reviewer summed up his opinion by observing, “Amid confessions and accusations out of left field, the play finally gets traction as Will and Lily Dale must make concessions and confront hard realities.”  In the end, he concluded that “one grows weary waiting for the late-blooming ‘Young Man’ to grow up into something satisfying.”

On CurtainUp, Deirdre Donovan warned that Wilson’s Young Man “might not be a mood-elevator,” but Quinn “imbues his character with a Texan-size ego and the vulnerability of an aging man who has lost his only son” and Nielsen “is fine as the spoiled wife, mother, and lapsed artist . . . who’s struggling to survive an unspeakable tragedy.”  Cowie’s set with Lander’s lighting “mirrors the dreams and disappointments of the Kidders” while Ramsey’s “costumes bring out the personality of each character.”  The production “can make you marvel at the resilience of the human spirit,” concluded Donovan, as it “illuminates the inner turmoil of a middle-class American family.”

Darryl Reilly of TheaterScene.net labeled Young Man a “wrenching . . . family secrets drama” and described the STC staging as “a tender revival.”  Reilly also invoked Death of a Salesman, but asserted “with his idiosyncratic and powerful command of dramatic writing [Foote] creates a distinctive narrative.”  The TS.net reviewer reported that “Wilson’s staging utilizes the accomplished technical elements to optimum effect” and scene designer Cowie’s “inspired efforts are integral to the production’s success.”  Reilley also lauded Lander’s “shadowy lighting,” John Gromada’s “jaunty and moody” original music and his “deft” sound design, and costume designer Ramsey’s “varied creations.”  He concluded, “Horton Foote and The Young Man from Atlanta’s stature is affirmed by this luminous incarnation.”

Fern Siegel on TheaterScene.com (not the same as the site above) explained that in The Young Man from Atlanta “Foote explores the dark side of the American Dream, as well as the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.”  Siegel reported that “Quinn plays Will . . . with brutal honesty” but “Nielsen . . . utilizes the same facial tics in all her roles to indicate disbelief or confusion.  It may be humorous the first time, but it wears thin.”  The TS.com reviewer added, “The ensemble cast is sound, and Michael Wilson’s direction is smooth.”  She feels that  “Foote is a subtle, understated playwright not known for his poetic dialogue,” concluding, however, that “he is adept at capturing ordinary people facing difficult moments with authenticity.”

On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora labeled Young Man a “deeply moving play about loss” that “provides joys and sorrows that remind us, again, of Chekhov’s plays, with their continuity of location and thematic content.”  It is a “gentle, heartwarming, heartbreaking play,” she said, which Wilson has directed with “sure and steady hands.”

“‘The Young Man from Atlanta’ . . . is the wrong play by Horton Foote to revive,” declared Jonathan Mandell in the very first sentence of his New York Theater review.  He found it “dated, and overrated” and filled with many “scenes that feel slow-moving and tangential.”  Mandell’s major complaint about Young Man is that not only are the characters keeping any mention of homosexuality off the stage, but so does Foote, who even employs “a hoary plot line for a drama that was first produced some 30 years after Stonewall”: the suicide of a closeted gay man.  For the New York Theater reviewer, this made The Young Man from Atlanta less worthy of revival than many other Foote plays. 

On New York Stage Review, Jesse Oxfeld started off making a similar complaint: Bill Kidder was gay, a “thing never said, and barely even hinted at,” and the review-writer found “in 2019, . . . that feels awfully old-fashioned.”  Oxfeld believes that the story Foote should be telling is the one about Will Kidder and his reversal of fortune and how he contends with that.  Instead, the play’s

hung up on the question of Bill’s death, whether we should believe the stories told by his unseen roommate, that young man . . ., or whether we should instead believe the distant relative who shows up from [Atlanta], claiming that the roommate’s stories are all lies.  And that’s much less interesting, because we’re not really invested in any of those young men, who all seem to be ciphers.

(I would point out to Oxfeld that it’s not Randy, the roommate, and Carson, the Atlanta relative, in whom we’re supposed to be “invested.”  It’s Will and Lily Dale.  It’s not the story-tellers who are our—and I believe Foote’s—focus, but the way the competing stories affect the listeners and how they respond.  After that, the success of the play becomes a question of how well Foote and Wilson accomplish that drama.)

Oxfeld reported that Wilson “presents a solid, straightforward production” and that the “performances are equally solid and straightforward.”  He praised Ramsey’s costumes (“appropriately, straightforwardly, midcentury Texan”) and Cowie’s set (“elegant, high-1950s”).  The NYSR writer noted in the end, “We never really learn what happened between the younger men, who is lying and who is telling the truth,” and remarked, “That may be how things were in Houston in the 1950s.  But on stage today, it doesn’t make for much drama.”

Despite a “uniformly strong” cast, James Wilson of Talkin’ Broadway felt, “The Young Man from Atlanta feels somewhat mechanical.”  Wilson found, “The exposition is a bit heavy handed, and the appearance of particular characters (including a former maid, portrayed by the excellent Pat Bowie, as well as the arrival of an acquaintance of Bill and Randy) rings as rather too coincidental.”  The TB reviewer thought the production is “up to Signature's usual high standards,” remarking that “Jeff Cowie’s set design is appropriately sterile and museum-like (but with a central courtyard, it is somewhat confusing in the layout of the off-stage rooms).  Van Broughton Ramsey’s costumes are period and class specific, and David Lander’s sunny lighting contrasts with the dark truths the characters wish to keep hidden.”  Wilson praised all the cast members and concluded that The Young Man from Atlanta  “may not pack the wallop it did twenty-five years ago, but [it] offers a potent view of the United States on the cusp of social and political change.”

Because of the unstated (yet central) theme of homosexuality in America in the middle of the last century, I want to present one additional review, one that comes from a gay perspective.  In Cultural Weekly, a free on-line platform for independent voices, David Sheward, the former executive editor and theater critic for Back Stage, the theater trade paper, observed that Young Man “reflects the attitude towards gays of the era of its setting (Houston in 1950).”  Sheward pointed out, “The queer figures are not even on stage, one of them has committed suicide, and they are only important in how they affect straight people.”  Sheward laid out the details of this unspoken theme:

The main struggle is that of bragging businessman Will Kidder (bluff but vulnerable Aidan Quinn) and his flighty, sweet wife Lily Dale (simultaneously tragic and comic Kristin Nielsen).  Several months after the mysterious death of their only son Bill, they are confronted by the unwelcome visit of the title character, Randy, Bill’s much younger roommate.  Will does not want to see Randy, but Lily Dale craves his company as a reminder of her child.  While the word gay, queer or homosexual is never even spoken and Randy remains offstage, it’s clear he and Bill were in a relationship and neither parent can face the truth.  This unmentionable secret is but one of many problems confronting the Kidders.

The CW writer reported, “The play has some clunky structural problems. The first scene is all exposition,” he complained, and Carson’s arrival and the fact that he conveniently lived in the same boarding house as Bill and Randy, seems contrived.  But “the production overcomes the script’s flaws,” Sheward acknowledged.  “Young Man honestly examines American middle-class mor[e]s of equating wealth with happiness and unflinchingly rips away the prosperous facade of the couple’s elegant existence as they must confront economic and emotional reality.”  Wilson “delivers a heartfelt, straightforward staging,” asserted Sheward, “with an impeccable and moving cast capturing the quiet desperation of Foote’s lonely family, detached from their gay son.” 

'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.”