‘Twilight’ Tidbits (Minus the Hammering)

“Twilight: Los Angeles 1992” wasn’t made just for Los Angeles.

Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman staged documentary about reactions to last year’s civic turmoil will move from the Mark Taper Forum to the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., in October. “Twilight” director Emily Mann is the artistic director of the McCarter.

Then it may well move on to New York. A logical presenter for it there would be the New York Shakespeare Festival, which lifted Smith into the public eye with her “Fires in the Mirror.” After seeing “Twilight” Sunday, festival director George C. Wolfe said he hopes it will come there. But the dates depend on Smith’s schedule, said Taper boss Gordon Davidson.

There may still be changes in “Twilight.” Although no work is “planned at the moment,” said Davidson, the show is “a living, vibrant thing.” It’s even conceivable that new interviews might be conducted and added, he said.

The show’s multi-media designer Jon Stolzberg said last week that he doesn’t want his material used in its present form when the show moves on. He’s disappointed that a presentation of 300 slides that he designed as accompaniment for his video was deleted--during the last week, he said--and that the video itself was abbreviated. He said the longer version of the video and the slides included material that hasn’t been seen in other media and that served as a balancing commentary to the predominantly violent images that remained on the video as shown. He hopes to find a forum where the excised material might be displayed.

Davidson responded that the decision was simply “an editing question.” The slides “took the focus away” from the video, said Davidson, and the video was shortened after it was moved to its current spot in the show because some of the material seemed “excessive”--too repetitious of subjects that Smith had already covered in her monologues.

“Twilight” exceeded its projected budget, Davidson acknowledged. He cited the number of trips Smith had to make to Los Angeles as one of the unanticipated “research and development” costs, as well as fees required to keep the production team working when the opening was postponed from June 3 to June 13 in order to accommodate last-minute interviews. He declined to cite dollar amounts; he said all the costs weren’t in yet.

But he contended that “Twilight” overruns won’t affect other Taper programming. The fiscal year is about to end, he noted, and he expects the season’s total expenses “to come in on target. We’ve gotten pretty good at shepherding a season, riding the highs and lows.”

At the opening performance last Sunday, several people questioned the noises they heard during Smith’s depiction of her interview with Angela King. It sounded as if someone were hammering backstage. More last-minute changes?

In fact, reported sound designer Jon Gottlieb the next day, those noises are intentional--they duplicate the outside hammering noises that Smith heard while she was interviewing King. Don’t let this extreme example of theatre verite distract your attention.