The purpose of this research is to examine voices of hope and despair articulated in Anna Deveare Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which is made up of vignettes that were performed in Smith's one-woman show and that, more significantly, function as commentary on the consequences of the Los Angeles riot of 1992. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which Twilight was written and then to discuss how the selected monologues convey the emotional content of social, economic, and political realities--or perceptions thereof--of the contemporary Los Angeles experience.
When on a spring afternoon in 1992 the policemen who were filmed on videotape beating a black motorist, Rodney King, Los Angeles gradually became a city under seige. Smith's play title, Twilight, refers to the hours after the verdict, when events of violence and property theft and destruction began to unfold. As Smith puts it, she searched "for the character of Los Angeles in the wake of the initial Rodney King verdict" (xvii). But that title can be seen as more than just metaphor for the hours after the verdict. For the highly charged nature of the response of the black community can also be seen as a metaphor for a whole range of circumstances that affect the Los Angeles experience, and the condition of some individuals and groups within that experience, which point in the direction of hope and despair together, separately, or in tension with each other. Smith says that beneath the verdict, which is for her a "surface explanation" of the term "riot" or "uprising" lies a "sea of associated causes" (xviii). That is why twilight is metaphorical for the condition of Los Angeles itself, poised between the day of hope, symbolized by great wealth and opportunity for some, and the night of despair, symbolized by great poverty and lack of opportunity for others. All of this is in the background of the words of people whom Smith interviewed when compi...