The Humans Within the Events : TWILIGHT; Los Angeles, 1992 / On the Road: A Search for American Character, <i> By Anna Deavere Smith (Anchor Books / Doubleday: $21.95, cloth; $12.95 paper; 265 pp.)</i>

Twilight, April 29, 1992. What Angelino doesn’t remember the first dusk of the Rodney King verdicts, as fire blazed on the horizon, smoke smeared the sunset and sirens called in the night? Despite the subsequent summer of fires and the Northridge quake, the memory of that first night of civil unrest remains indelible.

In May 1992, the Mark Taper Forum commissioned Anna Deavere Smith to tackle Los Angeles and the verdicts in her “On the Road” series, a theatrical experiment Smith had already applied to 1991’s Crown Heights crisis with award-winning success. What makes Smith’s theater particularly suited to the shapeless event that was “the verdicts” is that Smith doesn’t write plays, she collects them. She sifts hundreds of interviews into a selection of verbatim transcripts that becomes the “text” of her performance-piece. Smith then recreates on stage, word for word, pause for pause, accent for accent, each of the characters of her “social dramas,” regardless of their race, age, sex or language.

This book is a collection of those interviews, presented as a companion to the show that ran in Los Angeles from May to June of 1993, moved to the Public Theater in New York and is now on Broadway. Just as the script of “Twilight” evolved, losing and gaining characters as it was developed and moved, the compilation of interviews in the book differs somewhat from each of the three stage shows.

It contains 50 interviews with 46 characters. Some, such as Reginald Denny, Daryl Gates and Maxine Waters, are well known, but most are not media darlings. Smith has gone out of her way to find community voices not heard often in the media. In her interesting but too short introduction she notes that Amercia’s racial discussion “is much larger and more complex than a story of black and white,” and the media for focusing on black and ignoring Latino involvement in the riots. Yet white Anglo voices make up almost half the interviews while Latin voices are the least heard amid the various white Anglo, African-American and Asian-American voices.

Smith’s performance-pieces have been called “documentary theater.” The book could be more accurately labeled “documentary verse.” Even the layout of the text suggests poetry. Each interview is titled with a short quote from the transcript, followed by the character’s name and a brief description. The text is presented in choppy, free-verse style.

For those characters accustomed to public speaking, such as Waters, Gates or the Rev. Tom Choi, this typographical conceit seems gimmicky, arbitrarily disjointing interviews more accessibly presented as prose. For others, however, the free-verse style illuminates the poetry of “casual” speech and thought.

This is perhaps most effective in Smith’s final interview with the gang member for whom the piece is named:

So twilight

is

that time

between day and night.

Limbo,

I call it limbo.

. . .

So to me it’s like I’m stuck in limbo,

like the sun is stuck between night and day

in the twilight hours.

You know,

I’m in an area not many people exist.

Nighttime to me

is like a lack of sun,

and I don’t affiliate

darkness with anything negative.

Smith goes to great pains to capture the music as well as the content of language. The interview with Chung Lee, the president of the Korean-American Victim Assn., is presented phonetically in the original Korean and is accompanied by Lee’s son’s translation. Both are presented as spoken, with “uh’s” and pauses preserved.

Scholar Cornel West’s transcript comes alive with Smith’s annotations of his pronunciation quirks and physical attitudes:

On the one hand

there’s

like duh frontier myth in America,

right? (barely audible on the word “right”)

That we (hard to hear that “we”)

gain some moral and political (sic)

regeneration

...

If in fact our major myth is that of the

fron teer,

the way in which you expand the fron teer .

(He is leaning forward, with his head down close

to the desk, his

glasses seeming to sit on top of his ears, and

screwing up his face, as

(he literally puts his body into the idea)

is by being a gunfighter.

The interviews where the seams of Smith’s process, her attention to details of pronunciation and body movement, her “act of listening,” are best documented are the most engaging. That is where the seeds of Smith’s performance lie and without performance the interviews are more social anthropology or “documentary verse.” This is an evocative collection of Los Angeles’ disparate voices. Smith describes her theater as “looking for the humanness inside the problems. . . . The spoken word is evidence of the humanness.” “Twilight” is a moving documentation of the humanness that is the character of L.A.