‘Twilight’ Time

Anna Deavere Smith--writer, actress, chronicler of living events--is in a convertible, driving the mostly healed streets of Los Angeles. She is seeking remnants of the riots, set off nine years ago by the acquittals of the police officers who came upon Rodney G. King one fateful night.

“The questions we’re asking,” she says in the televised version of “Twilight”--her one-woman play about the impact and the implications of the riots on the city and the people who live here--”are, has anything changed? Was enough attention paid?”

Now the question becomes, will attention be paid on Sunday when PBS presents the second offering (the first was “The Man Who Came to Dinner” in October; next month comes A.R. Gurney’s “Far East”) of its Stage on Screen series?

Smith has worked hard to give viewers something, if not entirely new, surely rethought. As in her stage performance, she dons a hat here, grabs a prop there, while transforming herself into more than 20 figures directly or peripherally involved in the riots (speaking their actual words gleaned from hundreds of hours of interviews).

But now, viewers will also see and feel more: the harrowing footage of the King beating, the subsequent Reginald Denny beating, a city in flames. And there are in-hindsight interviews with some of the principals looking back with anger, denial, and perhaps some rewriting here or there?

“It’s not so much revisionism,” says Smith, sitting in the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan on a rare break in her schedule, “but I was surprised how much more palpable and painful the riots are to people of color. I found that white people had largely recovered. At the time of the riots, it was, ‘Oh, my God, how can this happen to my city, we have to get down and help these people, have we forgotten what happened in Watts?’ The fact is, their lives were threatened but not disrupted. For those whose lives were not in order in the first place, they still can’t forget.”

For those who choose to remember, there are 84 minutes featuring Smith in the guise of everyone from then-Police Chief Daryl Gates to King’s Aunt Angela (“We must find justice for my brother’s son”) to an anonymous Hollywood agent (“I’m eating my Caesar salad at the Grill”) to Harvard’s Cornel West (“I’m a prisoner of hope”) to jurors in the officers’ two trials. For the screen version, the play’s words have been pared by half, some of the original interviewees “have hit the [cutting-room] floor,” and the whole package has been given a direct, front-to-end telling of the riots.

“We’re telling the story in a different way, trying to build a narrative,” says Smith. “So my choices had to do with how to make it most effective/relevant/have a shelf life. If we think about someone picking it up 50 years from now, will it mean something? I can’t assume people will have the same experience as those who came to see it at the Mark Taper Forum a year after the riots.”

One might think with such a self-contained talent as Smith, a director would hardly be necessary. But, in fact, she was determined this telling not be just a filmed version of her play (as were past efforts of, say, Spalding Gray, John Leguizamo, Eric Bogosian) and sought outside expertise. She found it in documentary maker Marc Levin (“Slam”).

“She can be a headstrong artist, sure,” says Levin, “but she was open to the creative challenge of making this something different: integrating her process with archival footage, hip-hop music and having the opportunity to revisit some of the people involved. I warned her that some might say we’ve diluted or even polluted the purity of what she created on stage. But she opened herself up to that risk. And I learned that one person embodying all these others is critical to this particular story, because it is saying each one of us could be all these people.”

When Smith first burst on stage as a force of one embodying the many, she was unique. Less so today: Currently off-Broadway, Pamela Gien portrays about a dozen colorful characters in “The Syringa Tree”; on Broadway, Irish actors Sean Campion and Conleth Hill portray myriad roles in “Stones in His Pockets”; even “The Vagina Monologues” has occasionally been called Anna Deavere Smith-like.

“She’s been a great inspiration to me,” says Gien, who actually starred in a play written by Smith in the late 1980s. “It’s so rare for women to take her kind of journey, to take such artistic responsibility. When I felt afraid about doing all the characters myself in ‘The Syringa Tree,’ her own courage would come to me. She’s made this kind of performance acceptable. Beyond that, her works have resonance because they are about something greater than ourselves, and that’s what I’m trying to do here.” (Gien’s play is about growing up in South Africa.)

“I guess it’s the kind of work that can’t be read as much as embodied,” says Smith. “There’s something very essential about the storytelling.” There are some who question how much of an actress, per se, she is, noting that recurring roles on “The Practice” (as head of the D.A.’s office) and “The West Wing” (as a military advisor--a character created at former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s suggestion) and in films like “The American President” are less dazzling than her theatrical tour de forces.

“Am I doing impersonations? No,” she insists. “An imitation is a sketch. What I’m doing is what an actor does. I take the text and try to illuminate the words. I am trying to find the place where the reality of another person bangs on the door of my subconscious.”

“Twilight,” on television, comes at a time when several stage productions have, or are being, transferred to the small screen, from ABC’s “South Pacific” in March to HBO’s recent production of “Wit,” directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson. Smith would be more than happy to be included with the latter, in particular.

“What Mike Nichols and Emma did tore me to pieces,” she says. “The close-ups offered something you can’t get on stage, a feeling of real intimacy. I would hope we have even a few moments like that in ‘Twilight.’ ”

But what she most hopes for is that it will have a life after television, that this form may serve as a new kind of beginning. (Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested “Twilight” should be shown in every high school in the country.)

“We don’t have many cultural products that help us get our heads around the issue of race,” Smith says. “This is about sparking something in those who see it, especially young people. It’s not my intention to do the healing, it’s to expose the wound for whomever can stand to look at it. It’s to ask viewers, will you come out of your safe houses of identity and meet me at the crossroads of ambiguity?”

In the end, the viewer, and Smith herself, are left to wonder, could this happen again? She recalls when “Twilight” finished its run on stage, friends told her to move on, that--especially in the wake of the O.J. Simpson criminal and civil trials--her story had outlived its time. “But you know,” she says, “it continued [to have] a successful and important life. We should be very careful coming to those kinds of conclusions about what is and isn’t dated.”

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“Twilight” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on KCET and KVCR. PBS has rated it TV-14-V-L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for violent content and coarse language).