Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Anna Deveare Smith)

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 ve

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" (31). Second, the monologue suggests that enforcing despair upon minorities has the effect of making mainstream populations suffer as well, as indicated by the idea that "even" the white kids are suffering. The benefit of Davis's analysis is that he can point to evidence of deterioration in an ethos of equality; what is more disquieting about it is that his complaint about suffering white kids can be interpreted, not as an open-hearted sympathy for the special disdain for minorities but rather as disappointment that, whatever the perception of minority children, white entitlements are the real loss to the Southern California lifestyle. A portrait of hope and confidence turned to despair and regret--not only in Southern California opportunities but in the American legal system as a whole as well--can be seen in the statement of Josie Morales, a Los Angeles city employee who, independent of the famed Rodney King videotape, had witnessed the beating of King from her apartment window. But it turns out that Morales was an "uncalled witness" (66) in the notorious Simi Valley trial. This fact points toward subtle and pernicious social and political dynamics in the environment of official Los Angeles. Morales explains that she told her

Category: Arts - T