STAGE : A Mirror on Our Fires : A performance artist relies on the words of blacks and Jews to reflect the conflicts between (and within) groups

“I am interested in difference,” says Anna Deavere Smith in a voice that is raspy and, at mid-morning, seems muffled, as if wrapped in a layer of cotton batting.

In the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in Manhattan, Smith sits at a small table that is part of the set of her Obie Award-winning theater piece, “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities.” Those other identities extend to the inhabitants of a physically charred and psychically scarred Los Angeles in the aftermath of the worst civil unrest in this country’s history.

A performance artist and drama professor at Stanford University, Smith has been exploring “difference” since 1983 in a series for the stage called “On the Road: A Search for American Character.” She had planned to “make a big piece about Boston” that would use that city, because of its historical significance, as a site for American identity.

“Certainly,” she adds, “put on top of that would be racial conflicts.” She’s silent for a heartbeat. “A better way to talk about racial conflicts would be to say the challenge we have is to include difference in the landscape of American character.”

But the drama of real life overtook her artistic scheme.

On Aug. 19, 1991 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, an automobile from the motorcade of Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, spiritual leader of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish sect known as the Lubavitcher, hit another car and swerved into the sidewalk killing a 7-year-old Caribbean-American boy and seriously injuring his cousin. The driver of the car was taken from the scene in a private Hasidic ambulance, while, in an account disputed by police, Blacks alleged the boy lay dying waiting for a city ambulance. Later that same night, a group of about 20 blacks surrounded and stabbed a Hasidic scholar visiting from Australia. For three more nights, African-Americans and Caribbean-Americans clashed with members of the Hasidic community in Crown Heights. Those nights of rioting are the focus of “Fires in the Mirror.”

Smith postponed her Boston project and proceeded to write “Fires” while on a 1991-92 fellowship at Radcliffe College. She was asked by George C. Wolfe, a resident director at the New York Shakespeare Festival, to perform an excerpt at the Papp Theatre’s Festival for New Voices. Shakespeare Festival artistic director JoAnne Akalaitis liked the work and asked her to expand it to a full-length piece.

Her Obie was awarded for diverse achievement in Off-Broadway theater, and as one of the hottest tickets on or off Broadway, the show’s initial two-week run in May has been extended through Aug. 2. She’s had no offers to tour the show, but the actress-writer hopes that “Fires in the Mirror” will eventually be staged in Los Angeles, too. (Her play “Piano,” produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1990, received a Drama-Logue award for playwriting, and she has been recently commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum to write a new work.)

In “Fires,” Smith assumes 26 identities to portray the complexity of both the Jewish and black communities. In doing so, the 41-year-old African-American actress from Baltimore transcends age, ethnicity and color, unaided by makeup or dramatic costume changes. What she does employ is a remarkable human instrument.

In an amalgam of journalism and art, every word spoken by Smith in the 90-minute, virtuoso performance is from edited, verbatim interviews she conducted with Jews and blacks, or statements given by them to others.

Born in Crown Heights Hospital to an African-Caribbean and African-American family that embraced their half-Chinese cousins and East Indian ancestors, raised in other Brooklyn communities where I watched bagel bakeries give way to Jamaican restaurants featuring curried goat, and a frequent resident of cities prone to inter-ethnic violence--Miami and Los Angeles among them--I too am a student of difference. The lure of Smith’s work was irresistible, just as was her attraction to Crown Heights.

“Difference is so visible, so clear there,” Smith says. “Nobody can pass. The Hasidic people look like Hasidic people. Of course, as African-Americans, we look like African-Americans, but even in there, there is variety because of accents”--Caribbean-descended people, southern versus northern blacks.

In Crown Heights, there is no melting pot, she asserts. “I don’t think anybody believes that analogy works anymore. But we haven’t come up with one that does work . . . in the general consciousness that’s accepted. Here, in New York, they talk about ‘the gorgeous mosaic.’ Some people believe in it, some people don’t.”

Culture and ethnic identity in America is a “kind of constant, active negotiation” that eludes the melting pot, which stands for a process of cultural homogenization, Smith contends. With the pot, “it’s almost like what we are settling for is all of the liquid on the top while the weight,” --her voice suddenly booms--”of all the vegetables, all the stew--all the gold--is sitting on the bottom and we don’t really deal with that. What’s been eliminated is the drama--the real action that happened when things dropped in the pot in the first place.”

If we understand that process, do we really need one word or phrase to describe it?

“Maybe the fact that we use metaphors is inappropriate, “ she responds. “I’ve heard people use ‘salad bowl’ and this and that. . . . Maybe we are wasting our energy by thinking of metaphors. Maybe there is a more vigorous way to communicate.”

After all, one of the many lures of Crown Heights was the “expressive facilities” of the black and Hasidic communities, she says. “With the Lubavitcher, what was wonderful for me is that they are very passionate speakers. They sit up. They talk really loud. They are not cool.”

As for African-Americans, such as black activists Al Sharpton and Sonny Carson and controversial Afro-centric scholar Leonard Jeffries, Smith says she found them “extremely valuable as storytellers . . . amazing storytellers. As with the Jewish people in my work, I tried to show their gift for storytelling by showing their genius for details.”

With such expressive powers, “we should not have the problem of being repressed. We should not have the problem of being stuck behind language so it betrays us. We leave language. Like Sonny Carson says of young blacks, they don’t even engage in long dialogue, just ‘word.’ ”

Smith believes we should be able to communicate our concerns without hurting each other. And we would “if we were willing to see the specifics of that communication, rather than using a smear, a characteristic, something that somebody else taught us about that individual.”

She adds that most of what black people are saying about Jews in her piece “was learned.”

“That is sad. And that is why I can passionately speak from the voice of that rabbi, Michael Miller . . . in that ‘Heil Hitler’ piece when he says: ‘The hatred is so deep-seated . . . the anti-Judaism--if you don’t want to call it anti-Semitism--knows no boundaries.’ ”

What she “got” from Miller is that bigotry “permeated even the Afro-American culture and he didn’t think it would. And I really think we all have to wake up and make our own decisions. Just like children at some point, you have to leave the authority figures of your parents. We have to think for ourselves. We have to have original thought.”

That, she contends, is hard to find when schools have so thoroughly failed the inner city.

“With literacy gone, we don’t just lose the ability to read. And with math gone we just don’t lose the ability to add and subtract. We lose basic abilities to solve problems, to reason and analyze. That really worries me. That is the greatest theft of all.”

The way we define our social reality is central to “Fires.” The betrayal of words amounts to “lousy language,” she says in her portrayal of Robert Sherman, director of the community relations institute of the New York City Commission on Human Rights. “The Eskimos have 70 words for snow. We probably have 70 different kinds of bias, prejudice, racism and discrimination, but it’s not in our mind-set to be clear about it. So I think that we have sort of lousy language on the subject, and that is a reflection of our unwillingness to deal with it honestly and sort it out.”

Among the lousiest of our words is race --code for the scientifically bogus belief that physical appearance is related to moral, intellectual and psychological qualities. And while the so-called mainstream culture has just begun to seriously examine the class and cultural issues the term race obscures--especially in the aftermath of Los Angeles’ multiethnic uprising--black artists and intellectuals have been compelled to do so for generations. If you got an itch, you scratch it; and the distortions imposed by race have been a big itch for black folks.

But as a people constantly under siege in America, black consciousness and rhetoric on race has often been reactive, compensatory and confining--as well as a source of profound comfort.

In “Fires,” Smith, as Angela Davis, stands pontificating in a leather jacket: “Race, of course, for many years of our history as African-Americans in this country, was synonymous with the community. We upheld the race. We were race women and race men. Billie Holiday referred to herself as a race woman. . . .”

If anyone would have told her 20 years ago, says Smith-as-Davis, that in 1991 a black man who said that one of his heroes was Malcolm X would be elected to the Supreme Court, “I would have celebrated. (But) I have no problems with aligning myself politically against Clarence Thomas, in a real passionate way.”

Of the Senate confirmation hearings and the charges of sexual harassment leveled by Anita Hill, which Thomas termed “a high-tech lynching,” Davis says: “I don’t think it would have been possible to convince me that things would have so absolutely shifted that someone would evoke the specter of lynching on television and that the notion of lynching would be used to violate our history!”

Confronting, at the end of the 20th Century, new and insidious ways to be circumscribed and politically paralyzed by race, Davis concludes what many other people of color have: “. . . Race has become an increasingly obsolete way of constructing community because it is based on unchangeable, immutable biological facts in a very pseudo-scientific way. So whenever I use the term race now, I put it in quotation marks. Because I am interested in the sort of communities that aren’t static in that way. . . . I am working on . . . trying to find ways of coming together in a different way.”

Finally, she pronounces: “I am not suggesting that we do not anchor ourselves in our communities. But I think, to use a metaphor, the rope attached to that anchor should be large enough to allow us to move into other communities.”

Many people Smith interviewed for “Fires in the Mirror” challenged the concept of race, she says, but she “ultimately chose Angela’s material because it also made implications about gender, inasmuch as it refers to Clarence Thomas.”

The rasp in her voice subsiding, she tilts the upper part of her statuesque frame over the small table to make a point. “It was difficult to work gender into this show and it is something I feel strongly about. In my own work, I should be trying to develop a vocabulary, a way of working, that puts gender and race together. Because we don’t do that. That’s one of the catastrophes of the Thomas-Hill hearings. We had no way of talking about a black woman who had been abused by a black man, cause that doesn’t happen--right?”

The “anchor” of race puts blacks in an “either-or” dilemma when sexism is involved, Smith reasons. “If you’re supporting a man, you can’t expose these other things? That type of thinking doesn’t work.” But Smith thinks the notion of deconstructing race, as Davis and others suggest, is a challenge.

“Angela says it’s an exciting time. But it’s easy for scholars to talk about whether race is a trope or not.” Reality, however, “makes that seem foolish “--her voice makes one of its periodic sonic booms--to call race a figure of speech. “Because how can they look at Rodney King and say ‘Oh, race is just a construction,’ when a man is beaten, ultimately, because he is black?”

If we deconstruct race, what is the substance of a black identity?

“It seems that so much of the substance of our identity goes back to slavery. That’s something I thought a lot about in this piece . . . because I was equally aware that so much of the substance of being Jewish goes back to the Holocaust. I think that is a fascinating thing to think about. I wonder how an individual psyche begins to develop around something that he or she did not even witness in their own lifetime,” but nonetheless “integrates a myth--by that I mean a psychic truth, a generational truth--deeply into the soul. So that you feel blood, a kinship around this tragedy that won’t be erased.”

She leans back, tilting to the side a head covered with dark wavy hair streaked gold-brown. “I am ultimately a spiritual person. I am not sure that I can explain why I believe in kinship or sistership, but I believe it exists. To me, one of the most moving moments in my whole show is when Conrad Muhammad, the young Muslim minister, is talking about slavery.” He catalogues the centuries of atrocities, including pregnant black women’s bellies being ripped open with knives and they and their babies killed. “(Then he says) ‘These are some of the kinds of things, sister .’ . . . And when he says that, and I rehearse that, I get chills because I feel so grateful to have him name me in his family, even if I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says.

“Sister . . . that is such a powerful word, the way we ultimately want to be close--brothers and sisters.” She sighs. “At least we used to be that way; it is scary that that might be over.”

Over, perhaps, because we have not been able to accept diversity in our own midst?

Class, color, culture. Increasingly, these differences divide blacks who historically have had the anchor of “race” to unite them. During what a veteran of the Watts rebellions calls “The L.A. riots, Part 2,” some light-skinned and middle-class African-Americans said they felt as vulnerable to attack as whites.

“As a light-skinned woman, I have a lot of feelings about color conflict among African-Americans,” Smith says. “I don’t want to get into old cliches, but there is a way in fact that my darker sisters have given me a run around the block.”

As a teacher at UCLA, Smith says she taught a course challenging race and gender stereotypes. “It’s ultimately not enough to wear the color of your skin,” she asserts. “Kids I taught would talk about being outcast not because they were light, but because they didn’t ‘talk black.’ ”

Smith twists in her chair. “Maybe I should be careful. People will say I’m being controversial and argue that the black community has always been diverse, we’ve always had a little bit of everything. But we have had difficulties with that mix. We haven’t come out of our mix with a secure way of dealing with difference. So that when we hit this other mix, which is getting more complicated everyday, what are we going to do?

“Even for folks who are extremely Afro-centric, this gives them something to work with. ‘Hey man, we need to take care of some business. We got to get our skills together to deal with this.’ Because even if white America--by that I mean white, Christian, upper-class America, what (feminist writer) Letty Cottin Pogrebin calls the dominant culture--is not going to deal with difference, we cannot afford to pretend that the mix is going to go away. We have to find a way to be in it. Nobody else is going to teach us how to be in it.”

Defining one’s self without the social grid of stark dichotomies requires a tolerance for ambivalence. Smith suggests she possesses it. Good acting requires it.

A graduate of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, the performance artist claims that she’s always been controversial, wherever she taught acting.

“I was always bothered that the way actors were being trained was sort of ‘yes and no.’ ” She pounds a fist into the palm of her hand. Traditionally, she says, acting students are asked, “What is your goal?” Her voice is booming again. “ ‘What do you want?’ And anything that gets in the way is an obstacle. What I was teaching was ‘Uh, uh--you want this, this, and you want this.’ That’s a human being. A human being never wants just that. And those things a human being wants may be in conflict. I’m always training people to tolerate ambivalence, conflict.” That is also among the reasons she developed the “On the Road” series, she says, to create vehicles that would portray difference and say, as a rabbi in “Fires” does, we are different, we should be different.

This notion alarms certain assimilationists who write books about the disuniting of the nation, multilingualism leading to a tower of Babel and the specter of the Balkans on the Hudson. The fact is assimilation has occurred and will continue to occur. The issue is assimilation toward what? What is and what will be recognized as the shared American culture, which many argue is fundamentally European, African and American Indian? That can’t fully be decided until we honestly encounter and explore the difference in our midst. Here the storyteller plays a profound role.

Smith’s efforts call to mind Jo Carson, a white storyteller from Tennessee brought to Miami in 1986 to record her image of that riot-plagued city for American Public Radio. Sounding like a youthful Granny Clampett, she said: “I have just barely come to understand what stories do for people and with people in the making of common histories. They forge a sense of shared humanity among disparate peoples. Because we don’t have common histories at all.”