A Different ‘Twilight’ Falls on New York : Anna Deavere Smith’s Taper-born riot remembrance has 16 more characters on Broadway--and a stronger point of view

Two years ago this weekend, Los Angeles was burning. One year ago, Anna Deavere Smith was busy preparing her one-woman show about the people who witnessed those fires: “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” which opened at the Mark Taper Forum last June.

Now “Twilight” is on Broadway. And Smith’s compilation of re-enacted interviews with a wide variety of individuals who had something to say about the events of April, 1992, is a big hit with New York critics, if not yet a sellout with Broadway audiences.

The “Twilight” that’s in New York, however, is not the same show Angelenos saw.

In Los Angeles, Smith played 26 roles. While this may sound like a formidable undertaking, it was a snap compared to what she’s doing in New York. There, she’s playing 42 roles. Only 20 of the New York characterizations were created in Los Angeles. For New York, Smith dropped six characters and added 22.

“I had a lot of memorizing to do when I got here,” Smith recalled during a phone interview from New York last week.

Her journey to Broadway took a long time. Smith, who lives in Northern California, was in New York opening “Fires in the Mirror,” a one-woman show about a racial incident in New York, when rioting broke out in Los Angeles. “Fires” was a hit, but it never went to Broadway. Yet it inspired Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson to ask Smith to do a similar show about L.A.--a decision that prompted a few local artists to criticize the selection of a non-Angeleno who wasn’t even in town during the incidents she would be depicting.

Smith spent much of the next year in Los Angeles, preparing “Twilight.” Emily Mann, who had previously created the theatrical docudrama “Execution of Justice,” was brought in as director. Meanwhile, events continued to erupt as Smith worked.

A verdict was reached in the federal trial of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case just two months before “Twilight” opened, but the officers weren’t sentenced until a month after it closed. As she performed, the city was still “on the edge” over the events she was depicting, she said. “The audience was still trying to get over a trauma. And I knew that I would be part of the dramatic tension I was establishing.” Another layer of tension was added by the fact that the subjects of Smith’s research were likely to be in the audience in Los Angeles--not a possibility that crops up very often in New York.

After the Taper “Twilight” had closed, Smith attended the closing arguments in the Reginald Denny beating trial, which affected her perspective, she said. And the end of that trial gave her access to certain figures who weren’t previously reachable, such as Denny co-assailant Keith Watson, one of the characters added for New York.

It wasn’t just new characters who were imported for New York. A new director, George C. Wolfe, took over as well. The new version opened March 23 at the theater Wolfe runs, the New York Public Theatre, then moved to Broadway, where it opened at the Cort Theatre on April 17.

“The stakes were high in New York because it’s the artistic mecca,” Smith said, “but the stakes were just as high in Los Angeles in a different way. There was a lot of emotion in L.A., and I really cherish that experience.”

That emotion came from many different sources, she said. Growing up on the East Coast, she had thought of race primarily in black/white terms, but the multicultural dimensions of the events in L.A. “began to shake up what I thought race was. It’s not a two-pronged story.”

Her newfound awareness of this subject proved contagious. Referring to Wolfe, she said that “there were times when his head was spinning” over this subject. She said she heard and read criticism that in the L.A. production she failed to arrive at any particular conclusion, but “I was very cautious of the kind of people who wanted to wrap it all up. There hasn’t been that much in the past 20 years that has encouraged people to go beyond the bounds of ethnicity,” so she felt it was her job simply to let all viewpoints be heard.

Her experience in Los Angeles was a form of “community theater,” she said, hastily adding that she intends nothing pejorative by using that phrase. “I was there to be a part of the L.A. community.” Consequently, she conducted a large number of post-play discussions in Los Angeles.

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Don’t look for such discussions after performances of “Twilight” on Broadway. “In New York, the boundaries between me and the audience are much clearer. And there is a point in the show in which my point of view becomes much more apparent than it was in Los Angeles”--or, indeed, in her “Fires in the Mirror.” She believes that the New York “Twilight” is more “conclusive” than the Los Angeles one.

In fact, the literal conclusion of the show has changed. In Los Angeles, Smith ended with rather vague remarks by Gladis Sibrian of the Salvadoran rebel group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, USA, whose connection to the riots was unclear. Now Sibrian’s comments are no longer in the show. It ends with words by Twilight Bey, an appropriately named gang truce organizer. He appeared five characters from the end of the L.A. version.

“The end in L.A. was really hard to come up with,” Smith said. There were four dramaturges working on the show--”that would be a nightmare for most writers, but I made myself more available than most writers.” Even the designers were “groaning about how the show should end. I needed distance to see how I wanted to end it. I needed time with the text by myself”--for which she took a trip to Italy.

Likewise, the beginning of the show is no longer the same. Chung Lee of the Korean American Victims Assn. replaced sculptor Rudy Salas Sr. as the initial character (though Salas remains in the show). Smith credited Wolfe with shaping the new beginning.

“Twilight” now also has an intermission, for which Smith credited her New York dramaturge, “Angels in America” playwright Tony Kushner. She compared adding the intermission to the experience of “building a house and suddenly deciding to add a spiral staircase.” But she’s happy with the results.

Smith felt that the lack of an intermission in Los Angeles turned her interview with Reginald Denny into “the center of the piece.” This “may have made sense, because we still didn’t know what would happen” in the trial of Denny’s assailants. But now that incident is largely resolved, and she has returned to what she describes as her normal disapproval of the notion of a center. “I don’t believe in depending on centrality--it’s a false concept to expect everything to go to the center or move to the top.”

She admits there are still “certain sequences that gain the audience’s attention more than others”--sequences she labeled “whirlwinds.” But “it doesn’t boil down to one person,” as she felt it did in Los Angeles.

With the addition of many more characters and 40 minutes, the New York production has faster transitions and more intercutting between characters, with seven characters returning for second appearances. Smith attributed the idea of bringing back some of the characters to director Peter Sellars, who spoke to her after seeing the show in Los Angeles. Such interruptions realistically reflect the style of communications in L.A., she said. After she realized this, “we went kinda crazy at first and we wouldn’t let anyone finish a speech.” Now the show has only one-tenth of the interruptions that it initially had in the New York rehearsal process.

Several prominent non-L.A. characters--Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), singer Jessye Norman, attorney Lani Guinier--were added in New York to give the show a more national perspective. On the other hand, prominent L.A. attorney and former police commissioner Stanley Sheinbaum was dropped between Los Angeles and New York because Smith eventually felt his material was too L.A.-specific. However, this last deletion “breaks my heart,” Smith said.

“It was a bloody battle when the fellas suggested I remove” Sheinbaum, Smith said. He was a gracious host for her in Los Angeles, she said, but he’s also “a big metaphor with me in my life--he’s willing not to be on a side for the benefit of something bigger.” When Sheinbaum recently received an ACLU award, Smith performed excerpts from her Sheinbaum interview that hadn’t been seen at the Taper.

A few of the figures who made the final cut in New York are nonetheless represented by different material than they were in Los Angeles. One of them is former police chief Daryl Gates. “When I went to Italy, I listened to his tapes again. Now he talks more specifically about the events.”

Smith professed surprise that the reactions of the New York audience are as close as they are to those of the Angelenos who saw the show. However, she said there are a few clear-cut differences. One line that doesn’t get the same kind of laugh in New York as it did in Los Angeles comes when a talent agent reports hearing a rumor that “they’re burning down the Beverly Center.”

Smith hopes that others will eventually perform the “Twilight” material, just as a cast of four recently did her previously one-woman “Fires in the Mirror” in a Minnesota production. But in the meantime, she plans to take the show on a 12-week tour following Broadway, where it’s scheduled to remain through Aug. 7.

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Because there have been so many changes in this extremely L.A.-oriented production, how about a return to L.A.? Smith referred the question to her managing producer, Ben Mordecai. He said that should the show return, it probably would play the Doolittle, not the Taper, but no decisions have yet been made. The first call he would make on the subject, he said, would be to his “Twilight” co-producer, the Taper’s Gordon Davidson. Through a spokeswoman, Davidson expressed enthusiasm for the idea.

Further developments in the ongoing Rodney King saga occurred recently, and there may be more. But Smith foresees no further changes in the show. “Twilight” appears to be in its final form, at last--2,500 miles from the city that gave it birth.