TWILIGHT

At this remove, the fate of Los Angeles is a novelty. It's Saturday at the Parthenon and we noble citizens look on as it flashes gory in the sun, our own little Exodus replete with earthquake, fire, flood and riot: tantalizingly apocalyptic. Among the expatriate Angelenos, there might be swaggering or display of battle wounds, an anecdote about the aunt whose Malibu home slid seaward. But the real L.A. is far away, and so is 1992, the year of the riots. Not old enough for an anniversary, the remains lie unexcavated in the rubble of more recent crises. So at Harvard in the fall of 1998, pictures of that familiar smoke-darkened sky are like fresh posters for last month's bull-fight. We thought El Terror had been killed in the ring, and so the familiar image is like seeing a ghost. Things aren't so finished as they seemed.

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is extremely unsettling. In the tight darkness of Leverett Old Library, our distance from the riots is shattered as we descend the steps into the arena where we sit, often catching stray spotlight and in full view of the other audience members and actors. The space affords little of the accustomed anonymity, and from the start it becomes clear that the aim is not to please, but to trouble.

According to Director Tammy Chang, the goal of Twilight is not just to awaken the dormant phantom of the '92 riots, but to use it to re-expose issues of racial segregation and inequality. "Someone who comes away from the show thinking that they've seen the 'black perception' of the Rodney King Beating, or the 'Latino' perspective on police brutality will have missd the point completely," she says. Though the Rodney King verdict and the ensuing riots have all but vanished from the discourse of this university, discredited for their sensationalism, Twilight reinstates their importance in the struggle for equality. In the theater, finally separated from the distortion of the TV screen, the story of the riots comes clear and speaks more powerfully about America's problems than any number of important panelists.

The play is composed of 25 monologues transcribed verbatim from interviews with "people who had a special perspective" on the riots. The interviews were first incarnate as a one-woman show and most recently have been published in book form. Because of the original one-woman format, and also because the material comes from one-on-one interviews, the performance is devoid of dialogue or character interaction. Generally, such a format would risk looking like an acting exercise, but in Twilight it implicitly explains one of the reasons behind the riots. Chang notes that "each character lives in a box, limited by experience and what they know." The lack of interaction speaks to the lack of dialogue in the city, the silence of segregation. The riots were the result of an inability to communicate in any other way than violence and media sensationalism. The sense that things could be resolved if only the monologue would fork out into a dialogue pervades the play and leaves the audience ultimately unsatisfied.

Obviously, Twilight was politically-charged. Presented by the AAA players and Black Cast-organizations whose political and artistic goals are closely connected-it was clear that art here was subservient to the show's political message. Outside of the monologues, every element of the production was representative of "the message." Twilight is produced in the round, and over each of the four sets of bleachers is suspended a drop representing one of the four ethnicities that clashed in the riots. The audience is divided by these pendants into neighborhoods; Black, Korean, Latino, White, "drawing the audience into the conflict," according to Chang. Though each drop is well conceived in its own right, the aesthetics clash fiercely against one another. One in pastels looks like Monet in Watts; another (depicting the poor black neighborhoods) could be mistaken for an Ade Bethune woodprint. The effect is intentionally distasteful. Like the dialogue, each neighborhood is beautiful in isolation to the others, but the combination is discordant.

The fragment aesthetic is carried over into the blocking and movement of the cast. In the interpretive dances that broke up the monologues, too many representational constraints were placed on the choreography to permit exuberance or even beauty. Each move had to mean something, and resulting dances were mechanistic, burdened by the weight of "the message."

The strength of the production were the monologues: a Latino man dealing with the horror of two generations of police brutality. A seargent explaining the brutality as the police's reaction to government dictums; a do-gooder bent on creating communication between the communites; and a man who would enter other communities as invader. Some of the most poignant stories were the least political--the magical account of a Latino woman who survives being hit by a stray bullet, a narrative in Korean (translated by another actor) about the looting of her shop. The actors faced a tough task in making their acting as realistic as the language provided by the script, and they often succeeded--overcoming the difficulty of accents and the absence of the interviewer to whom they were speaking.

The show was produced without intermission, so that, but for the dancing, the audience was forced up against the monologues without respite. Under the burden of the characters' problems, and in the recounting of their riot experiences, lives a realism far stronger than footage of a burning building or the photograph of a beaten man. Further, while the riots were wrapped up by the media and dismissed as another news item of 1992, the conflict in Twilight remained unresolved. As a non-fiction work, the conflict that was opened by the monologues, remained opened and messy at the plays conclusion. When a peaceful ending was denied, and the unsettling reality of the play remained, the fragmented aesthetic of the production became sensical. The aesthetic incongruity was not a failing but another voice for the message of continuing social unrest and inequality.