San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Amid protests, ‘Twilight’ more timely than ever
I steeled myself before streaming Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles” on PBS.
I knew the film, based off her onewoman play, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” about the unrest following the police beating of Rodney King, would make me, as a white person, feel more keenly, more viscerally, how little has changed for Black Americans in 28 years.
I also knew that Smith’s embodiment of 40 reallife characters, in all their vocal, physical and facial tics, created from 300 interviews she’d conducted, would dazzle me in its technical precision. I anticipated that the sheer variety of perspectives represented — activists, police officers, lawyers, politicians, artists, shopkeepers; Latinos, Koreans, Blacks, whites — would evoke, as few other media could, just how endlessly complex this painful moment in our country’s racial relations was, how farreaching its implications were.
But I didn’t anticipate that the gut punch would come before the docudrama itself started.
In her introduction for PBS, where you can stream the show through June 2021, Smith cites current events as a factor in the decision to rebroadcast: “In light of the challenges facing our country right now, I hope that this encore presentation of ‘Twilight’ offers some lessons learned in Los Angeles and that they can be applied now.”
Apt as that introduction is for our era, it was filmed in 2015, not 2020. Smith was responding to the death, in police custody, of Freddie Gray and its aftermath.
I wondered if we’re doomed, each time a Black citizen dies another senseless death, to look to Smith for answers to the same question — or whether this moment was different.
“I don’t know that I can say that the outcome will be different, because I don’t have a crystal ball,” Smith tells me by phone. But she does see differences between the recent resurgence of Black Lives Matter activism, following the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, and what she observed in her extensive study of Los Angeles in 1992. There was more destruction then, she says, and there was an additional layer of complexity with the Korean American community, following the killing of Latasha Harlins.
But in our time, “it’s relevant that it happened during the pandemic,” she says. Additionally, “the protests are worldwide,” in a way that they weren’t almost 30 years ago. She thinks young people’s concerns about climate change, about student loans, about health care, about the presidential election, “all fed into the streets” in 2020’s demonstrations. Los Angeles didn’t become a movement, but our moment “may be” one, she says — especially given previous Black Lives Matter activism.
Smith has had “Twilight” in the forefront of her mind in preparation for a Signature Theatre production that had been scheduled to begin performances in New York in April, performed not by her but by five other actors. Asked if any particular characters seem to speak to our time, Smith first mentions Rep. Maxine Waters.
In a speech in the film, performed verbatim (as she does in all her docudrama), Smith as Waters says, “We had an insurrection in this city before, and if I remember correctly, it was sparked by police brutality. We had the Kerner Commission Report (which studied the causes of 1967’s racial unrest) and as I stand here today, in 1992, I see that what that report cited still exists today.”
Reflecting on that moment, Smith says, “I don’t want to say too much, because I’m older than a lot of people who are on the front lines now, and they should be on the front lines. But it’s like, OK, here we are, 27 years later. And that was 30 years ago. So that makes this almost 60 years. And we know that it actually goes back centuries, this kind of abuse.”
Smith also thinks about the character of a police officer in Los Angeles’ special weapons and tactical unit, who laments that the reason the police had to beat King was that they weren’t allowed to use a choke hold any more — the implication being that it’s a more efficient method of suppression.
“It’s not about the choke hold,” Smith says. “It’s about the force itself. If the way you were controlling people was just to put toothpicks in their shoulders, too many toothpicks could kill them.”
To watch Smith take on her characters is first to witness rigor on broad display. Her sundry voices spike and squawk and snarl. One character seems to speak by pushing words through the crack in her front teeth. Another’s mouth