She is shocked and horrified by the riots, and seeks to blame the series of events on individuals and policies rather than community groups or any kind of entrenched racial tension. Anna Deavere Smith's interviews in Crown Heights were conducted over approximately eight days in the fall of 1991. The second section, "Mirrors, " contains only one scene, in which Aaron M. Bernstein discusses how mirrors are associated with distortion both in literature and in science. • Fires in the Mirror was adapted and filmed for television in 1993, as part of the "American Playhouse Series" on PBS. Not only do African Americans win Muhammed's prize for competitive suffering, but "we are the chosen… the Jews are masquerading in our garments. " Cato died a few hours later, and members of the black community began to react with violence against Lubavitcher Jews and the police.
Directed by Katrinah Carol Lewis. But nothing about the Tonys makes much sense. Shange sees identity as an interplay between being a "part of [one's] surroundings" and "becom[ing] separate from them. " One of the key tools in Smith's artistic process is to render the words in poetic verse; this allows her to arrange each character's words in an aesthetically beautiful form, and to emphasize certain words and phrases that she finds important and that express the rhythm of the interviewee's speech. Examine newspaper stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as well as accounts of the situation in magazines and in newspapers such as the New York Post. Green is the director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective and the codirector of a black-Hasidic basketball team that developed after the riots. As a solo performer, Smith also invokes discourses of performance theory and vinuosity, both of which have shaped her reception by academic and Modem Drama, 39 (r996) 609 610 JANELLE REINElT popular critics. A New York Times editorial in 1990 denounced Jeffries as an incompetent educator and a conspiratorial theorist, and between 1992 and 1994 Jeffries fought a legal battle with the City University of New York over his chairmanship of the African American Studies Department. According to the New York Times, there were also rumors that a private Hasidic ambulance picked up three Jewish people and left the dead boy and another injured black child behind. Through the use of Wendall K. Harrington and Emmanuelle Krebs's graphic projections, a series of photographs captures the contorted world of violence, accident, grief, and revenge. Michael S. Miller then argues that the black community in Crown Heights is extremely anti-Semitic. It uses the same format as Fires in the Mirror and has received wide critical acclaim, including an Obie Award. I was trying to explain it was my kid! Three hours later, a group of black youth attacked Yankel Rosenbaum, a twenty-nine year old Hasidic student, visiting from Australia.
Smith learned about interviewing and embodying people by experimenting with various... The simile is apt in describing his grief and rage, not to mention the grief and rage expressed throughout the country in these inflamed times. As spectators we are not fooled into thinking we are really seeing Al Sharpton, Angela Davis, Norman Rosenbaum, or any of the others. Smith constructs her plays from interviews with persons directly or indirectly involved in the historical events in question and delivers, verbatim, their words and the essence of their physical beings in characterizations which rail somewhere between caricature, Brechtian epic gestus, and mimicry. It starred Smith, was directed by George C. Wolfe, and was produced by Cherie Fortis. Meanwhile, black characters, including Leonard Jeffries, Sonny Carson, Minister Conrad Mohammed, the anonymous young man from "Wa Wa Wa, " and the Reverend Al Sharpton, tend either to group Jews together with dominant non-Jewish white culture or to blame Jews specifically for the oppression of blacks. Choose a well-known figure, such as Angela Davis, the Reverend Al Sharpton, or Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and research that person's real life and career. He says, "That's not a real mirror/as everyone knows/where/you see the inner thing. Lingering – Carmel Cato closes the play by describing the trauma of seeing his son die, and his resentment toward powerful Jews. There are a total of 29 monologues in Fires in the Mirror and each one focuses on a character's opinion and point of view of the events and issues surrounding the crisis. No Blood in His Feet – Rabbi Joseph Spielman describes the riot events; he believes that blacks lied about the events surrounding the death of the boy Cato in order to start anti-Semitic riots.
The character is a complex fiction created collectively by the actor, the playwright, the director, the scenographer, the costumer, and the musician. George C. Wolfe's description of his "blackness" is similarly unclear. From anonymous young men and women, to well-known leaders like Al Sharpton, to middle-aged Lubavitcher housewives, characters reveal a struggle to establish their personal identities and to negotiate how they fit into their religious and racial communities. A profile of Smith that includes her thoughts about Fires in the Mirror, Rugoff's article praises the play and Smith's performance in it. The daughter of an elementary school principal and a coffee merchant, she was the oldest of five children. In "Isaac, " she is reluctant at first to share a Holocaust story because she worries that they are becoming dulled through overuse, but she goes on to read about the horrific experience of her other's cousin. Donning a variety of hats, caps, yarmulkes, cloaks, and accents, she manages to move easily among a large number of people from vastly different backgrounds and temperaments. Fires in the Mirror was Smith's major breakthrough. This is a dangerous process, a form of shamanism.