It explores the viewpoints of people from Black and Hasidic Jewish people based in New York City who were connected directly and indirectly to the Crown Heights riot that occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August Fires in the Mirror is composed of monologues taken directly by Smith from transcripts of the interviews she conducted with the people whom she portrays in the play. She interviewed more than individuals in the course of creating this play. It is considered a pioneering example of the genre known as verbatim theatre.
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On August 19, , in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a car in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, sped through a red light, struck another car, swerved onto the sidewalk and hit and killed Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black boy from Guyana, while severely injuring his cousin Angela.
Almost immediately, rumors spread that an ambulance, privately run by the Hasidim, had taken the driver and his fellow passengers to the hospital, while the young black children lay bleeding on the ground.
That night, a group of young black men retaliated by stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum, a year-old Orthodox Jewish scholar from Australia, who eventually died in the same hospital as Gavin.
Over the next three days, a race riot erupted , in which black residents protested the police, stormed the Lubavitcher headquarters, and targeted Jewish businesses. Shortly afterward, the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith began interviewing black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights, as well as creative artists and community leaders.
But the day before, when a mostly white jury acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, the Public briefly closed over fears of racial violence. Opening on Nov. In a lively interview at the theater last week, Smith and Washington talked about what a male actor brings to the play, his appreciation for the fluidity of her characters and what the play still has to teach us about race and American identity.
An edited version of the conversation follows. Well, how about Mr. How about Conrad Muhammad, whether you agree with him or not. How about Al Sharpton? There is this feeling that only a black man could be a black man. When we went looking for an individual who was going to play this part, everyone assumed it was going to be a woman. But I wanted to see if it makes a difference to have the presence of a black male body onstage.
So I campaigned for them to see men as well as women in casting. Michael, you play so many characters — a Haitian teenage girl, an anonymous Lubavitcher woman, Angela Davis, and black and Jewish adolescent boys.
Were you at all concerned with taking on so many different types at once? I grew up doing competitive speech and debate. It was part of our training to become as fluid as possible, to play men and women and different races and ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations.
So when I got this part, it was like a return home. Back then, it was considered part-journalism, part-theater. Now can we just call it a play? My early work had 20 actors in a group, and I was working toward having an acting troupe that would go around America and mirror cities and their incidents. What you see now came out of that process. Every time I read it, which is every morning and every night, I find another thread in the tapestry that connects the themes.
If you follow the line breaks, which is following the logic of the thought, you can hear the person come alive. This play was performed at a really contentious moment in American history. How do you think it stands today?
But they would fight through that emotionality and go into action. Even Mr. Anti-Semitism could appear any time. We rarely get to hear such a wide range of people disagreeing with each other at the same time.
What are you saying about democracy? And that was 25 years ago. That was so revolutionary. And it still is. How do we meet the stranger? With hatred or kindness? Do we all become the same? I say no. Until now. Home Page World U.
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Fires in the Mirror
I have also seen the performance live, and refer to that occasion and other instances of live performances in this essay. Since , Anna Deavere Smith has come to public prominence in the United States as a result of two shows she has conceived and performed about events of extreme national importance involving issues of race. One event took place on the east coast, the other on the west coast, and her first performances of the respective plays opened in the geographic location of these events within a year of their origin. Thus, Smith's work has contributed to a local as well as a national dialogue and reflection on race relations in the troubled present. Smith constructs her plays from interviews with persons directly or indirectly involved in the historical events in question and delivers, verbatim, their words and the essence of their physical beings in characterizations which rail somewhere between caricature, Brechtian epic gestus, and mimicry.
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He Took Her Parts in ‘Fires in the Mirror.’ All 25 of Them.
On August 19, , in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a car in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, sped through a red light, struck another car, swerved onto the sidewalk and hit and killed Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black boy from Guyana, while severely injuring his cousin Angela. Almost immediately, rumors spread that an ambulance, privately run by the Hasidim, had taken the driver and his fellow passengers to the hospital, while the young black children lay bleeding on the ground. That night, a group of young black men retaliated by stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum, a year-old Orthodox Jewish scholar from Australia, who eventually died in the same hospital as Gavin. Over the next three days, a race riot erupted , in which black residents protested the police, stormed the Lubavitcher headquarters, and targeted Jewish businesses. Shortly afterward, the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith began interviewing black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights, as well as creative artists and community leaders.
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