Drama professor Anna Deavere Smith created a form of multiple-viewpoint
docudrama which she used to delve into the psycho-social dynamics
which produce riots. "Fires in the Mirror," which I
saw first in 1995, is a monologue about the conflict between African
Americans and Hassidic Jews in Crown Heights, New York.
To prepare for her performance, Smith went to Crown Heights and
interviewed a wide range of participants -- from well-known figures
to nearly anonymous bystanders. Then she carefully selected several
minutes from each interview and thoroughly memorized that moment
-- not just the words, but the voice, mannerisms, and look of
each person speaking. She performs each of these fiercely diverse
voices, one after the other. She dresses up like each character
and speaks that actual person's words with their passion and reality,
for two minutes, or eight. The light fades and then, after a pause,
a new character appears (Smith, again) to tell us another way
of looking at what happened. By the finale the audience has gained
deep insights, not only into the individual stories of these real-life
characters, but into the collective story they unintentionally
wove into a dramatic collective fabric. "There is no one
answer, no one viewpoint or conclusion, that can hold all this
complex reality," Smith seems to be saying. "Let go
of your own perspective for a while and let the full story sink
in. Enter into the collective mind that made this thing happen."
When I first saw a video of this performance, what seemed most
compelling to me was not so much the interaction between these
viewpoints as the solidity of the viewpoints themselves, the amount
of sense they made within their own frame of reference, and their
mutual incompatibility which remained, like an echo or an odor,
as her monologue ended.
I thought to myself: This solidity of viewpoints is what
leads to these profound human tragedies. To the extent we live
out our stories in isolation and mutual misunderstanding, we will
create collective stories of mutual destruction, almost whether
we want to or not. To the extent we can step outside our insular
stories to realize the intrinsic logic of everyone's stories,
we may become able to co-create collective stories more consciously,
ones that are at least tolerable, perhaps even mutually beneficial
or even joyful.
A video of her similar drama about the LA riots, Twilight: Los Angeles, is available through PBS.
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