The Tangle Over ‘Twilight’ : Anna Deavere Smith, journalist? Anna Deavere Smith, playwright? Her ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992’ has been both hailed as a sensation and beset by debate over whether the piece is a play or just reportage. Who’s right, Tony or Pulitzer?

Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play about the riots, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” now struggling to survive on Broadway after six weeks despite rapturous reviews and standing ovations, could gain additional longevity and respect if it wins either of the two major Tony Awards for which it is nominated tonight in New York.

Since its prominent premiere last year at the Mark Taper Forum, which commissioned it, “Twilight” has been both hailed as a sensational theatrical event and bedeviled by disagreement in the theater community and press as to how it should be measured--whether it is truly a work of the imagination and therefore pure dramatic art, or whether it is a form of journalism as performance art and therefore something less.

The argument was highlighted a few weeks ago when this year’s Pulitzer Prize jury in drama disallowed “Twilight” for final consideration on the grounds that its language was not invented but gleaned from interviews. That it was even being discussed by the Pulitzer jury was an indication of how high the play had soared in the minds of some critics, while the decision to disqualify it for technical reasons might have been puzzling to anyone aware that the previous year’s Pulitzer jury had judged Smith’s earlier show “Fires in the Mirror” (similarly developed and performed, about ethnic battles in Brooklyn) a legitimate runner-up for the 1992 prize.

The Tony nominating committee evidently had no such qualms about “Twilight,” but to further confuse the general public, some will notice that while “Twilight” is one of the four Broadway plays up for best play (along with Tony Kushner’s “Perestroika,” Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle” and Arthur Miller’s “Broken Glass”), the play that won this year’s Pulitzer, Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” is not represented tonight. That’s because “Three Tall Women” is playing Off Broadway, and the Tonys stubbornly limit themselves (yes, still) to shows playing inside the geographical boundaries of the historic theater district in houses with at least 500 seats.

When it comes to theater awards, it’s good to keep in mind that there are often matters of real estate involved, and in the case of the Pulitzer, the internal politics of the jury. Regardless, the debate over “Twilight’s” worthiness for these traditional honors is not so surprising given that it seems to be a wholly new form, dazzling but unfamiliar--and therefore a challenge and threat to established boundaries of official approbation.

Yet the debate is confounding all the same to those who believe that the first measure of any play or theater work--especially in today’s beleaguered theater world--is whether it makes itself felt so strongly that people want to see it. And this certainly was true of “Twilight” in Los Angeles, where in its last weeks it broke box-office records for the Taper.

Smith, a San Francisco-based actress, assembled the two-hour piece from 200 tape-recorded interviews she conducted with all manner of people involved in or affected by the three days of violence and civil disturbance that began April 29, 1992. She described the intention of “Twilight” as “my search for the character of Los Angeles in the wake of the initial Rodney King verdict.”

She revealed that character through her uncanny impersonations of roughly two dozen of the people she had interviewed, stretching her talent for mimicry from the voices of public figures like Reginald O. Denny, Daryl Gates and Stanley Sheinbaum to anonymous citizens white, black and brown. In a series of fast-moving monologues, she painted a swirling collage of a city at war with itself. And she did this, under the circumstances, with a considerable amount of humor and entertainment value.

*

The effect Smith achieved onstage was impressive, but what was she doing exactly? Or did it matter what we called it? It was not a play like “Our Town” or “Death of a Salesman,” nor was it a personal monologue of the kinds popularized by such writer-actors as Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian.

It was nonfiction, but interpretive nonfiction, a theatrical relation perhaps to the literary forms of “nonfiction novelists” like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Joseph Wambaugh who combined reporting with novelistic narratives. Who remembers--probably not this year’s Pulitzer jury in drama--that Mailer’s 1979 book, “The Executioner’s Song,” based on many tape-recorded interviews, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction , when most people took it to be a nonfiction account of the life and death of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore?

For that matter, Robert Sherwood’s 1938 play, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” borrowed largely from Lincoln’s writings and speeches and was awarded the Pulitzer. “A Chorus Line,” built by Michael Bennett and James Kirkwood from interviews with Broadway dancers, won the prize in 1975. There are many more examples of successful stage plays--Jay Presson Allen’s “Tru,” Eric Bentley’s “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett--that were shaped from the words of real people collected from existing writings or transcriptions.

Searching for the roots of Smith’s “Twilight” method in so-called “documentary theater,” one looks all the way back to the fabled Living Newspaper of the Federal Theatre Project during the 1930s, the Group Theater’s “Waiting for Lefty,” by Clifford Odets (that addressed the 1937 New York taxi strike) or to the earlier Taper shows “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (1968) and “The Trial of the Catonsville 9” (1971). There is, of course, the work of Emily Mann (“Still Life” and “Execution of Justice”), who directed “Twilight” at the Taper. Even so, there seems to be no clear precedent for what Smith has done at this professional level. She appears to have established a new genre, and at the moment she is a genre of one. This is a mixed blessing at awards time.

She has also been nominated for best featured actress in “Twilight,” but traditionalists in the theater may not be ready to grant her full status as a writer, as an established older American playwright confided to me recently, while requesting anonymity. “It’s an eloquent performance all right, but there’s a lot of concern among Tony voters that it’s not a play,” said the playwright.

*

Robert Schenkkan, author of “The Kentucky Cycle,” which won the 1992 Pulitzer and is nominated for a Tony tonight, holds a similar view. “From a dramaturgical point of view, it’s not a work of the imagination,” said Schenkkan. “This is not to take anything away from her performance, which is amazing. I think of it as performance art, not as a play.”

Others feel differently.

“I think it’s going to be an issue for some critics and some people in the theater,” said Emily Mann, a leading proponent and practitioner of documentary theater. “But a lot of writing, if you will, goes into one of these pieces. There’s an incredible amount of craft involved. You still have to make a play.”

“I thought it was wonderful,” said Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright who won the Pulitzer in 1989 for “The Heidi Chronicles” and one who speaks up in Smith’s behalf. “I think of it as a work of art. There is an individual voice there, the eye of the observer. It’s constructed in a theatrical way. It moves. It’s documentary theater but it’s different from ‘docudrama’ because she’s dealing with character. It begins with character, which is what it has in common with a lot of other plays.”

Tom Moore, who directed the Pulitzer-winning “ ‘night Mother” on Broadway and the radio documentary play “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers” for L.A. Theatre Works, said about “Twilight”: “It’s the way one shapes reality that makes theater. Not anyone could come up with a way of doing that. There’s an argument to be made that she did write part of it since she asked the questions.

“Theater is becoming a form that no one thinks is relevant, and here is a piece that has shown relevance and vibrancy, that is important, clever and well-done. So why in the world should it be excluded?”

“That connection that is made between the stage and an audience and between the audience and the artist, that is what the theater is about,” said Lloyd Richards, director of August Wilson’s plays “Fences” (Pulitzer, 1987) and “The Piano Lesson” and for 30 years director the National Playwrights Conference. Did he consider “Twilight” a play? “Categorizing it is something that’s imposed on it. It’s not what the art is about. One can say about something, what is the creative element in it? Sometimes assemblage is creative. I was moved or I was provoked or I was enraged or I was entertained by it. That’s where it’s at.”

Oskar Eustis, a director at the Taper who worked with Smith as an adviser during the development of “Twilight,” made this observation: “Categories are invented before an art form is invented. When you have category confusion, the artists are usually ahead of the judges.”

During the years he was running the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, Eustis commissioned and directed “Execution of Justice,” about the trial of Dan White, the man who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city Supervisor Harvey Milk. “Just the act of putting on that play for that community over and over again was an act of reliving these events that we had so far failed to process,” he said. “And thus we made in the theater an event take place that could only happen in the theater. You needed to be surrounded by other people from the same community. You couldn’t be sitting in front of your television set.”

The tradition of taking real-life events and finding a way to put them on the stage that both reflects the immediacy of news reporting and the thematic complexity of a work of art is one of the ways theater has of being different from the museum or the ballet, he pointed out. “It’s a grubby, immediate art form, and yet it is an art form.”

*

There remains the question about “Twilight”: Will it last? Shouldn’t the projected durability of a play or book or movie be a measure of its greatness or lack thereof? Probably, except that this is the most difficult of all standards to apply with any accuracy, given a glance at history. How many “classics” of just the last 25 years in the theater already qualify as answers to trivia questions?

“Twilight” seems a piece very much of the moment, an address to a city by a visitor who spent some time here and summed up her thoughts for the stage. But should this diminish its value? The Pulitzer jury concluded that Smith’s work “is not reproducible by other performers because it relies for its authenticity on the performer’s having done those interviews.”

Smith herself disputes this conclusion and reasoning. But call it truth or call it fiction, it is hard to imagine an Anna Deavere Smith show without Anna Deavere Smith. Trying to read “Twilight” is only a little more fruitful than trying to read “A Chorus Line” or “Phantom of the Opera.” And in any case the published version differs significantly both from the staged version seen at the Taper and the one now on Broadway, which was altered again under a new director, George C. Wolfe, adding new characters (including a laughing Keith Watson, co-assailant of Reginald O. Denny).

In a way, this continuous tinkering is just an additional problem for anyone trying to measure Smith for a formal gown of respectability. Because she is up to something else, asking audiences and the authorities to look at theater fundamentally as a work in progress, taking place one night at a time. This is possibly a radical idea.