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This has become the season when we put reality onstage.
I mean weak laugh theres precious little of it in Facebook/social/Congress, amirite?
Using text pulled from documents or interviews isnt new, but it has become suddenly and simultaneously urgent.
To guide us in that thinking, no one is more important than the docudramatist Anna Deavere Smith.
In 1997, she moderatedthe legendary August WilsonRobert Brustein debate, the only public intellectual who could.
The remount shifts the fundamental equation of her practice: Smith no longer plays all the parts.
In many ways, the revision is a relief.
I find it harder now to be comforted by that particular illusion.
And also, my response to the theater-of-impersonation has shifted.
In the new version ofTwilight, the company has engaged with that differently directly.
Smith interviewed more than 300 people, approaching them with a thousand questions.
Why did a convenience-store owner, Soon Ja Du, shoot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins?
What was the target of the resulting destruction?
How do activists describe the uprising, as a triumph or a failure?
Time inTwilightpasses swiftly because every second is wound tight, tight, tight.
Each time, the grainy video plays and the show stops.
I think these videos hint at the reason for our current passion for reality in the theater.
I think its that we need to do penance for our greatest shared sin: our short attention span.
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992is at the Signature Theatre until November 14.
