Smith Discusses Issues After Performance

Fires in the Mirror, Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show at the American Repertory Theatre, provoked a wide range of responses. The A.R.T. organized three panels to consider the issues raised in the representation of the Crown Heights deaths. On October 8 (after the matinee), the panel will include Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair, Dept. of Afro American Studies; Hubert Jones, Dept. Dean of School of Social Work, Boston University; Charles Ogletree, professor of law, Harvard Law School; Henry Rosovsky, Geyser University Professor. On October 9, the panel will consist of Alan Dershowitz, professor of law; Florence Ladd, Director, Mary Ingram Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College; Deval L. Patrick, chair of New England Committee, NAACP. Ticketholders to any performance are welcome to attend.

The October 1 panel produced a lively discussion on Smith's performance. Randall Kennedy, professor of law, expressed his "delight, curiosity, and admiration" for the performance: delight at its artistry, curiousity about Smith's biases, admiration that the biases were so unidentifiable. Kennedy praised "the way in which you were so generous with your characters," bringing "a profound empathy to each and every one." Nathan Glazer, professor of education and social structure, reflected on the ways in which the Black and Jewish communities were represented. He commented that the Lubavetch community, while very noticeable in Crown Heights, is statistically a small and thereby unrepresentative part of the larger Jewish community in New York--and about 50,000 out of a national Jewish community of five to six million. He suggested that a fuller spectrum of the Black community was represented, although Deavere Smith pointed out that the Black, middle class was missing entirely.

Barbara Johnson, chair, Department of Women's Studies, reflected that to her the strength of this piece was in its "lack of governing consciousness. The desire to establish a solid ground from which the rest can be seen as spectacle is exactly what this performance thwarts. It is constantly impossible to say what the true story is. [This is] both the artistry and the political strength of the performance. A desire to get to an authoritative version would exclude a lot of the voices and a lot of the disturbance." Members of the audience also raised questions about systematized power and dominance as a "reality we all have to think about." One audience member saw the performance as a "powerful populist statement" while another saw it as an analysis of "politics, power, and its spokes people." Smith noted that her decision to use '29 out of the 50 monologues she recorded was not aesthetic or political. Rather, it was based on the crucial issue of whether "the will to communicate over what could cause inhibition" was present.

Kenneth Reeves, mayor of Cambridge, who earlier had noted with humor that as moderator, he would not monopolize the microphone as panelist, reflected soberly on the issue of rage among youth in urban areas. Alluding to the murder of an MIT student last month in Cambridge, he asked the unanswered question, "How do we produce children of any variety who don't value life?"