9

Performing Trauma:
Race Riots and Beyond in the
Work of Anna Deavere Smith
Alison Forsyth

Here follows a provocation for documentarians, those who cul-

tivate the soil of reality; about making art out of the real, look-
ing to the real to find a new aesthetics, meanings, feelings that
actors have been faking. It’s only natural that we would look
to the real to find ... fiction. And what do we do now that we
find out how easy it is to fake, even, say, a memoir (Million Little
Pieces)? I say we get real – er ... But my question: Does the acad-
emy help? Us, get real? Perhaps if it’s real we want, we should
recall the fight about theory (real?) vs. practise (real?). What’s
realer? Let’s get real.
(2006, p. 192)

Isn’t it somewhat of a paradox that Anna Deavere Smith’s vigorous invo-

cation to those working in the documentary mode to ‘get real’ post-
dates her own best known works in the genre by over 15 years? Not
necessarily. Although Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn
and Other Identities (1992, first directed by Emily Mann) and Twilight:
Los Angeles 1992 (1993, first directed by Christopher Ashley) are early
examples of theatrically documenting the ‘real’ behind two quite dis-
tinct examples of urban trauma, events have unfortunately conspired
to make the traumatic an inescapable condition for all of us living in
the twenty-first century. Following the catastrophe of 9/11, documen-
tary theatre makers have been challenged as never before to convey
‘the real’ to an audience that continues to be bombarded on a daily
basis, with startling immediacy, by a form of mediatised shorthand
for the traumatic – moving, static and repeated graphic images of war,

140
 Performing Trauma 141

death and mayhem. This seemingly increasing surfeit of horror, readily

accessible through a range of media, presents the risk of emotionally
anaesthetising the very people that documentary theatre attempts to
communicate with and inspire. Indeed, in an eerie inversion that recalls
and compounds Smith’s own words in the opening quotation of this
chapter, Susan Sontag observes that the vocabulary used to describe the
catastrophe of 9/11 is often the language of the representational rather
than the real:

The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was
described as ‘unreal’, ‘surreal’, ‘like a movie’, in many of the first
accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from
nearby. After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films,
‘It felt like a movie’ seems to have displaced the way survivors of a
catastrophe used to express the short term un-assimilability of what
they had gone through: ‘It felt like a dream’. (2003, p. 19)

Those working within the documentary form and during ‘what has
become the long moment after September 11th’ (Dolan, 2005, p. 3) are
thus compelled to formulate new ways to escape the melancholic recyc-
ling of the numerous tragic stories on stage ‘which no less than tra-
gedy itself, dull our critical receptors and prevent historical complexity
and our complexity in it – from emerging’ (Diamond, qtd in Román,
2002, p.137). This, then, is the painfully inescapable context of Smith’s
proclamation to current and future documentarians – a required pre-
amble to this discussion of her own highly distinctive and instructive
approach to ‘performing trauma’ in relation to the race riots in New
York and Los Angeles during the early 1990s.
In both Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, Smith investigates the ugly and
violent racial conflict that beset major cities in the United States – the
former focusing on the interracial unrest between the black and the
Jewish communities in an area of New York, following the accidental
death of a black child as a result of being hit by an allegedly speeding
car that formed part of a Hassidic rabbi’s motorcade,1 and the latter,
an exploration of the effects of the terrifying violence and mayhem in
Los Angeles that ensued after the acquittal of the four police officers
charged with the beating of black motorist, Rodney King.2
A common feature, applicable to the two plays under consideration, is
the methodology behind their construction, typified by Smith’s delib-
erate recourse to disparate, competing and often conflicting oral testi-
monies relating to a given event, and presented within a non-linear and
142 Alison Forsyth

decentred structure devoid of formal theatre conventions, such as the

fourth wall and a clear narrative trajectory. In this way, Smith does not
aspire to present the truth of the traumatic event; rather, she facilitates
a preferred version of a truth of the event that can be potentially elicited
by the audience’s response to the gaps, fissures and fault-lines exposed
by way of a multi-vocal performance of the carefully-arranged and
hermeneutically-charged juxtaposition of testimonies. This is exemplified
by a juxtaposed ‘collision’ in Twilight between the poignantly brief yet
deeply earnest words of Chris Oh, Korean stepson of the seriously injured
Walter Park, in the section ‘Execution Style’, and the self-centred, emo-
tionally detached, verbose but vacuous testimony of Elaine Young, in
‘The Beverly Hills Hotel’. Unlike the ostentatious Young, whose mono-
logue is literally dripping with references to her wealth and status, the
muted and restrained tones of Oh suggest a sad, anxious, traumatised
man who lacks the linguistic ability to express his anger and who mod-
estly declares his status as that of concerned stepson. Not only does
juxtaposition have the potential to elicit a wry smile of the type one can
experience when presented with a scenario that swings from the sub-
lime to the ridiculous, but also it is a potent yet subtle means of drawing
attention to the huge disparities that exist with respect to wealth, aspir-
ation and opportunity, often in direct correlation with ethnic, racial
and religious origins. The gaps created by juxtaposition are echoed by
Smith’s method of performance, particularly when her acting involves
racial and gender crossover – an approach elucidated by her words:

I don’t believe that when I play someone in my work, that I ‘am’

the character. I want the audience to experience the gap, because I
know if they experience the gap, they will appreciate my reach for
the other. This reach is what moves them, not a mush of me and the
other, not a presumption that I can play everything and everybody,
but more a desire to reach for something that is very clearly not me.
(qtd in Kondo, 2000, p. 96)

The electrifying synergy produced by Smith’s astute selection, arrange-

ment and performance of testimonies is infused in difference, and the
partiality borne of such difference. In this way, the silent but meaning-
ful gaps between each monologue and between performer and ‘charac-
ter’ speak volumes.
In a manner akin to the practice of many key documentary film makers
such as Frederick Wiseman, the power of juxtaposition is harnessed by
Smith to generate ‘cause and effect sequences’ and to suggest ‘theories
 Performing Trauma 143

for explaining events’ that on first sight she appears to be only docu-
menting, but which we discover are mediated by her skills as creative
collator, organiser and performer of these verbatim accounts (Young,
1990, p. 158). Some critics have considered Smith’s creative use of what
is often sensitive and personal source material as misleading, distorting,
manipulative and indicative of the ‘exploitative’ measures allegedly taken
by documentarians (see Geer, 1998). In contrast, and over and above the
requirements of documentary theatre to balance the treatment of socio-
political, historical and cultural issues at grassroots level with the remit
to execute this with the tools of artifice and within an aesthetic frame-
work, Erica Nagel makes a convincing retort to such charges:

It could be argued that an artistic representation by someone who is

not ‘of’ the community can illuminate things about a community
that are invisible to the people within it. If a community has control
over the way it is represented perhaps it will choose to conceal rather
than to confront the issues and conflicts in the community. (2007,
p. 160)

The de-familiarising and fictive devices utilised by Smith, alongside

her one-woman performance of the testimonies, make for a distinctive
amalgam that, as Jonathan Kalb observes, links ‘compassion and iden-
tification with objective scrutiny in a way that [...] accounts to a new,
peculiarly American form of individualist Verfremdung’ (2001, p. 19).
Smith’s audiences are prompted to actively engage their critical facul-
ties to join up the dots and ‘read’ the interstices that help constitute
the plays, to consider the relationships between different ‘characters’
and the possible reasons behind the frequency with which they talk (a
few ‘characters’ have at least two monologues). One such example is the
silicone-scarred, ageing starlet/realtor, Elaine Young, whose loquacious
self interest leads her to tellingly concentrate on a combination of her
own problems and her own social diary, regardless of the violence on
the streets, which she ungrammatically dismisses with the tone of a
woman insulated by money, and little else:

No one can hurt us at Beverly Hills Hotel

’cause it was like a fortress. (Deavere Smith, 1994, p. 155)

Indeed, Young’s vulgar egocentricity is in stark counterpoint to Smith’s

stated socially progressive aim to show, through performances of works
144 Alison Forsyth

like Twilight and Fires in the Mirror, that ‘our color, our gender, our
height, our weight is only a frame of something else ... we need to get to
“we,” to get to move from “me” to “us” ’ (2000b, pp. 71–2). Both plays
considered here reflect an open declaration on the part of Smith that
the value of testimony resides not in its neutrality but in its partiality
as source material. Only once the audience has seen the play in full,
is light shed on the full meaning of earlier testimonies, and only then
can the audience take up the challenge to hermeneutically synthesise
the individual perspectives to form, if not a judgement, then an opin-
ion about the riot and, most importantly, the heterogeneous commu-
nity in the midst of it. Documentary strategies such as these ‘introduce
splintered or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past’ that,
in keeping with the opaque complexity and gravity of the events con-
fronted in Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, acknowledge that any truths
must by necessity be contingent, plural and thus relative (Friedlander,
1976, p. 53). This strategy, seemingly based on ‘talking head’ interviews
with people remembering an event and the circumstances of an event,
is further complicated by Smith ‘performing’ all the testimonies in the
form of a one-woman show – a performance strategy that deliberately
creates a ‘disjuncture between the performers’ gendered, raced bodies
and the bodies of their interviewees’ (Kondo, 2000, p. 96). The racial
crossover in Smith’s performance illustrates the way in which ‘the
actor’s body can become potential sites of resistance to racism’ (Kondo,
2000, p. 97) because, as Smith states, ‘we live in a society of visual rhet-
oric’ (qtd in Kondo, 2000, p. 96), where assumptions, preconceptions
and judgements are made in accordance with what or who is seen,
including people with a specific racial and ethnic origin. In this sense,
Smith’s dramatic explorations across the terrain of racial conflict, inclu-
sive of her underlying goal to de-essentialise race through performance,
are clearly mediated. Rather than striving for the representation of an
allegedly inviolable truth of an event and the ‘characters’ linked to it,
Smith is driven on a pragmatically political level to investigate how life
became as it is, in the present.
Nagel argues that Smith’s active engagement with members of trau-
matised communities could be considered a paradigmatic example of
the potential hybridisation of two distinct types of theatre – drama
created about a community and drama created within a community.
Indeed, both plays under discussion exemplify the aims and objectives
traditionally associated with documentary theatre: namely, to artfully
reveal the circumstances around a past event, as well as employing
strategies commonly utilised in socially engaged community drama,
 Performing Trauma 145

such as interviews, oral testimony and an open forum for the often
therapeutic expression of community opinions, with a view to social
transformation.
This suggested hybridity in Smith’s practice is particularly evident at
performances, which not only tend to attract spectators who have never
before attended live drama, but which also comprise audiences from
the selfsame community members whose words and essential charac-
ter traits and personal attitudes provide the substance of the play they
are watching. The productive and exciting phenomenon of what are
commonly self-segregated racial, ethnic and religious groups watching
the representation of the racial conflict in their own community, side
by side, with those they may well have feared, despised, and racially
abused in the past, is indeed, testimony to the progressively therapeutic
effects, however transient, of Smith’s dramatic methodology. In con-
sequence, the combined aesthetic and social dimensions of Smith’s
plays provide a convincing riposte, firstly, to the quite frequently lev-
elled charge that community-based and socially-engaged theatre is ten-
dentious, formulaic, predictable and lacking in aesthetic affect, and,
secondly, to the oft-repeated critique of a perceived exploitative, voy-
euristic and parasitic tendency in the relationship between documen-
tary theatre and the community. Indeed, and as a rejoinder to the latter
point, it is worth noting that when Smith began work on Twilight, she
specifically requested a team of dramaturges because, as she explains:

I was afraid that my own ethnicity would tell this story about L.A.
in a way that reduced it to black and white – that’s what I knew
about race in America, black and white ... I asked Dorinne Kondo,
a Japanese-American anthropologist ... I also asked Hector Tobar, a
reporter for the Los Angeles Times of Guatemalan descent ... and I
asked the African American poet, Elizabeth Alexander ... to join me.
(1995, pp. 86–7)

By divesting control of the retrieval and collation of testimonies pro-

vided by certain sections of the Los Angeles community, Smith dis-
played a measure of sensitivity and a degree of self awareness, not
only towards a city subsumed by racial hatred but also a disparately-
composed community, lacking ‘an urban centre to draw its populace
together’ (Villarreal, 1994, p. 111). Such production choices clearly
exemplify how Smith adapts her approach for different environments
in the expectation that she might ‘capture the personality of a place by
attempting to embody the varied population’.3
146 Alison Forsyth

By astutely compiling, selecting and juxtaposing the oral testimonies

gathered from a broad sweep of representative witnesses and bystand-
ers who are in some way implicated in the events surrounding the
riots, Smith constructs densely-textured narratives, threaded through
with delicate and shaded details of the past, in the form of repressed
memories, lingering pain, past grief and traumatic flashbacks. These
are, in turn, put into relief by an interwoven pattern of resultant preju-
dice, assumptions, stereotyping and grievances in the present. In this
respect, both plays, to varying degrees, reflect not only the ethnographic
breadth of a specific environment embroiled in racial conflict, but also
the historical depth that one would expect in drama that focuses on the
highly sensitive issue of trauma. This historical depth is movingly por-
trayed in Fires in the Mirror in which the two ethnic groups in conflict,
African American and Jewish, confront the traumatic events in the pre-
sent by making frequent reference to their own community’s respective
foundational traumas – slavery and the Holocaust. This regressive mel-
ancholia in relation to a past foundational trauma is a well-researched
phenomena and it has been suggested that the sense of difference cre-
ated by traumatic heritage can become a kind of calling, a status, where
people are drawn to others who are similarly marked – finding comfort
in a sameness based on suffering and loss.
Two emotionally-charged testimonies, Seven Verses by Minister
Conrad Mohammed and Isaac by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, sit side by side
in Fires in the Mirror. Both illustrate the tendency of the traumatised
to take flight from present anxieties and to find a grim sanctuary in
past remembrance – the former to slavery, the latter to the Holocaust.
Letty’s testimony is suffused with past family history and includes a
distressingly evocative tale about her uncle, Isaac, read from her own
book about Holocaust survival, Deborah, Golda and Me. Isaac, we learn,
survived the horrors of the concentration camp not only because ‘he
was blond and blue-eyed’ but also as an egregious ‘reward’ for ‘herding
into the gas chambers everyone in his train load’ including his wife and
two children, ‘as if shoving a few more items into an overstuffed closet’
(Deavere Smith, 2000a, p. 1131).
Not only does Fires in the Mirror possess a core and quite tightly-knitted
dialectic structure as provided by the two distinct neighbouring com-
munities who come into conflict, but also this sense of cohesion is sup-
plemented by the repetition of a key theme – the death of a child and a
mourning father: Carmel Cato grieving for his son, the murdered son
and brother, Yankel Rosenbaum (a visiting Australian Hassidic scholar
to New York, who was randomly murdered in retaliation for the death
 Performing Trauma 147

of Gavin Cato), and the aforementioned Isaac who, after the war, end-
lessly repeated the story of his loss and Holocaust survival until ‘when
he finished telling everything he knew, he died’ (p. 1131) are all potent,
unifying allusions to the foundational biblical story of Abraham and
Isaac. Although diverse voices, dialects and cadences resonate from each
of the embattled communities featured in Fires in the Mirror, the lan-
guage is far more structured, and the testimonies are more revealing
than many of those in the later play, Twilight – a reflection perhaps of
the sprawling ethnography and social disconnectedness of Los Angeles.
Despite brief and occasional allusions to foundational trauma such as
slavery, Twilight is very much a product of its time and place, provid-
ing a postmodernist shopping list of cursory references to popular cul-
ture and recent history, past actresses such as Dorothy Dandridge – the
first black ‘Carmen’, Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’, the Watts Riots in the 1960s,
Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement, to name but a few. In this
respect, the distinctions between the two plays in terms of content are
pronounced even though, in their construction and mode of perform-
ance, these works seem very similar. As opposed to Fires in the Mirror
with its dialectical polemic, measured design, figurative language,
structured sense of environment with mapped streets and known ‘quar-
ters’, strong narrative shape and psychological depth (provided by cen-
tral reference to foundational traumas), Twilight’s narrative reflects the
longstanding lack of social, historical, cultural and political cohesion in
Los Angeles. In regard to the latter, this makes for a performance that
is loosely dialogic, non-polemical, flat and dominated by a profound
sense of alienation and dissociation – not only in relation to the seem-
ingly disengaged Los Angeleans, but as also suggested by the references
to a landscape that, apparently, can only be negotiated via impersonal
and fast-moving freeways.
Such a catalogue of divergences between the content and compos-
itional values of the two plays attests to the flexibility of Smith’s docu-
mentary practice, but this also points to the quite distinct ways in
which trauma is made manifest. In Fires in the Mirror, traumatic mem-
ory is demonstrated as having a unifying quality, even to the degree
of providing a link between two communities that are locked in racial
conflict. In a sense, the fatalities at the very heart of the Crown Heights
riots are ‘rhetorically attached to the foundational historical traumas
that lie at the centre of each group’s identity’ (Jay, 2007, p. 125). There
is little evidence of such a traumatic bond in Twilight. Here, in this city
of transient strangers at the behest of casual employment and immi-
gration laws, long term memory is absent. Los Angeles is presented as
148 Alison Forsyth

an anonymous, damaged and lonely space – a place in which youths

such as Twilight Bey stalk the streets in the dead of night. This is a
city made up of many distinct ethnic and racial groups and yet, para-
doxically, individual identity appears to have been strangely effaced by
poverty, plastic surgery and fear. In addition, not only is Los Angeles
further complicated by the relationships between the increasingly
diverse groups that make up the city’s ‘peoples of colour’ but also by
the increasingly obvious tensions within specific racial groups. The vio-
lence here appears almost casual, random, unnoticed, insignificant, as
emphasised, for example, by ‘I Was Scared’ – a young student’s over-
dramatised and exaggeratedly worried monologue about the possibility
that vandals might damage her father’s favourite car when he visits her
in Los Angeles. Twilight presents a distinctly fragmented environment
in which material objects are seemingly invested with the same, if not
more, value than human life.
Although the brutal beating of Rodney King was the iconic and hor-
rifying event that was, ultimately, to propel Los Angeles into a three
day maelstrom of rioting, arson, murder, robbery and looting, one has
a sense when watching Twilight that, within quite a short time, the atro-
cious incident will have long receded from many minds in the city and
attention will be switched, rather too soon, to another scandal, crime,
outrage. ‘Hammering’ provides an aural backdrop to a number of tes-
timonies, suggestive of a city resorting to expedient makeshift repairs
and quick remedial ‘patching up’ as opposed to taking time to reflect
upon and solve the deeper structural problems at the very foundations
of Los Angeles social fabric. It is the very insubstantiality of the testi-
monies at the core of the play, and the fact that the central event and
its causes are not really addressed let alone ‘resolved’, which denies the
audience the hope of potential reconciliation or progress. This was a
view endorsed by Sandra Tsing Loh just after Twilight opened at the
Mark Taper Forum in 1993:

I like theatre to give shape where there is none. Which is not to say
that Deavere Smith doesn’t represent fragmentation astoundingly
well. Twilight struck me as incredibly accurate, which is not the same
thing as hopeful.4

The two plays discussed in this chapter were written a relatively short
time after the events that shaped them and, in varying ways, they indi-
cate very forcefully the strength of feeling in the period following the
riots. However, Cathy Caruth suggests that ‘the impact of the traumatic
 Performing Trauma 149

event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located,

in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place
and time’ (1995, p. 9), and it is exactly this dislocating unpredictabil-
ity of traumatic memory that needs to be taken into account not only
by documentarians but also by archivists and historians. As suggested
during this comparative consideration of Fires in Mirror and Twilight,
testimony relating to traumatic events can transform over the years, as
mnemonic perspective is altered by, for example, nostalgia, regret and
grief which may supersede earlier sensations of shock, anger, indigna-
tion and fear. In this respect, it is well to be cognisant of the fluidity
and instability of trauma testimony, whilst still respecting its sincerity,
credibility and validity. Similarly, as testimony of foundational trau-
matic events is relayed to the next generation or even passed down a
long line of generations, the physical, emotional and intellectual dis-
tance associated with ‘post-memory’ (memories that are kept ‘alive’ in
the present by being passed on through the generations) alongside the
potential sacralisation of a traumatic heritage, are all issues germane
to the critical study of memory, oral testimony and trauma. Indeed,
in Fires in the Mirror, Letty Cottin Pogrebin expresses her concern that
‘we’re trotting out our Holocaust stories too regularly and that we’re
going to inure each other to the truth of them’ (p. 1131), revealing the
pain, unease, awkwardness, confusion and even shame often experi-
enced by those whose identity is, in part, shaped under the burdensome
and painful yoke of foundational trauma.
Another aspect of oral testimony, particularly testimony related to the
memory of traumatic events, is its potential to fall victim to ideologic-
ally driven sequestration and distortion. Many researchers involved
in the collation and archiving of oral testimony lament that, in the
words of Mary Marshall Clark, ‘few opportunities exist to study how
people reconstruct the past before a dominant public narrative has been
created by those who have a vested interest in defining the political
meaning of events’ (2002, p. 569). This comment strikes at the core of
Deavere Smith’s documentary practice and is especially pertinent to
any discussion of Twilight – a piece that is complicated by the fact that it
was created after the controversial and widely disseminated video-taped
evidence of the Rodney King assault had been analysed, raked over and
narrativised by the media and the law courts. Crucially, however, both
works discussed in this chapter, ‘document’ aspects of tumultuous and
traumatic social experience before the experience is subjected to any
potential or subsequent appropriation or indeed elision within hege-
monic historical narratives.
150 Alison Forsyth

In the aftermath of 9/11, public discussions about how and by whom

memory, particularly memory of traumatic events, is shaped and articu-
lated have become particularly urgent. Deavere Smith’s quixotic and
arresting approach to performative ‘documentation’ opens up a space
in which such contentious debates can be problematised, embodied
and brought into compelling focus.

Notes
1. Crown Heights is an area in New York, Brooklyn. At the time of the civil
unrest, the neighbourhood was home to approximately 180,000 people –
consisting of Caribbean Americans and West Indians (50%), African
Americans (39%) and Jewish residents (11%). The riots began on 19 August
1991, after two seven-year-olds, Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela, were acci-
dentally struck by an automobile driven by Yosef Lifsh which was part of
the motorcade for a prominent Hassidic rabbi. Cato subsequently died of his
injuries. Some members of the community were outraged because Lifsh was
taken from the scene by private Hatzolah ambulance while city emergency
workers were still trying to free the children who were pinned under the car.
Rumours abounded after the incident, one of the most inflammatory being
that the Hatzolah ambulance crew were unwilling to help non-Jews and the
delay contributed to the child’s death.
2. On 3 March 1991, a black motorist called Rodney King was heavily beaten
with clubs and tasered by four LAPD officers, following a high speed auto-
mobile chase. The incident, minus the first few minutes when police claim
King violently resisted arrest, was captured on video by a private citizen,
George Holliday. The footage became an international media sensation as
well as providing a rallying point for activists in Los Angeles and elsewhere
in the US. The Los Angeles riots started on 29 April 1992, after the four police
officers were acquitted on almost all charges relating to the assault. Within
hours violence erupted in the Florence and Normandie areas of Los Angeles,
including the assault of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver and Fidel
Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant in two separate incidents. 58 people were
killed during the riots, with the violence crossing racial and ethnic lines.
3. Programme Notes, Twilight Los Angeles 1992. Mark Taper Forum, LA. (June–
July 1993).
4. As above.