'New things to learn' in Anna Deavere Smith’s revised ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992'

For more than three decades, playwright, actor and scholar Anna Deavere Smith has asked audiences to ruminate on America’s long-simmering economic and racial divide through documentary-style dramas she has written and performed as one-person shows.

For “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Deavere interviewed about 350 people – from former  Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters to citizens of many ethnicities from across the city – to create an indelible docudrama about the riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King after an allegedly intoxicated King led police on high-speed chase.

Originally performed solo, the play – which opened at Broadway’s Cort Theatre in March 1994 and  received Tony Award nominations for best play as well as best actress for  Smith's performance – was recently revised by Smith for off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre.

Now featuring a cast of five, the new production, directed by Taibi Magar, will be presented by the American Repertory Theater in association with Signature Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge beginning Aug. 28.

The A.R.T. has previously presented Smith in productions of her “Fires in the Mirror,” “Let Me Down Easy” and “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.”

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“When Signature invited me to be a playwright-in-residence and produce some of my plays, I knew I wanted to do two of my earlier works and also a new one,”  Smith said during a telephone interview.

The first, 1993’s Pulitzer Prize runner-up “Fires in the Mirror” – which deals with the 1991 Crown Heights riot – was presented in the fall and early winter of 2019, not long before the pandemic shut everything down, and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” was postponed until late last year.

Smith, who does not appear in the production but has been active in its development said, “I knew I wanted to evolve it. From my first show in the 1980s, my work was always intended to be done this way.

“In terms of my revisions, with five actors I’ve been able to construct a dinner party scene with people around the table who would not have been able to be together before. And a scene involving jurors is now acted out by five people including a white man, a black man, a mixed-race person and a Latinx person.”

Smith said she knows the diverse cast will make some audience members more comfortable, and others perhaps less so. What’s making her comfortable, however, is seeing her work in a new way and realizing how well it holds up.

“I was involved in all the auditions and what surprised me was how alive these characters still were,” she said. "Listening to the five actors play so many different characters, I thought, ‘These people really did say amazing things. Verbatim theater can be very powerful.'"

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Smith said her memories of King and the L.A. riots remain vivid.

“How could such a brutal beating, captured on videotape and replayed all over the world for a year, be categorized as within the bounds of a ‘reasonable use of force’? A person with no connection to Rodney King used a Sony Handycam to capture footage that would show the world what some Americans, living in what amounted to police-controlled war zones, experienced every day.

“And 28 years later, a 17-year-old, Darnella Frazier, used her cellphone to record the video of George Floyd that led to worldwide protests against police brutality,” she said.

The Floyd case and other tragic reminders that racial tensions still roil America are evidence that Deavere’s 1994 play remains relevant.

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“When I wrote ‘Twilight,’ I thought about it like an opera, with all different kinds of relationships that were happening between us in this country. Now, we are thinking about why we can’t find a way to belong together.

“And I think we have a chance, given the larger conversation in the world and the political conversation in the world right now, to put the play against a modern background and see if there are new things to learn,” Smith said.

With that in mind, Smith – who, as an actor, is known for her work on television in “Nurse Jackie” and “The West Wing,” and in films such as “The American President,” “Philadelphia” and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” – revisited some of her original interview subjects.

“I went back to Hector Tobar, the author and journalist who contributed to the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer prize-winning coverage of the riots, and who was my guide to the Latinx community. I put Hector into the revised version of the play,” Smith said. “He brings it to George Floyd, right to today.”

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The Baltimore-born Smith – recipient of the 2013 National Humanities Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship (the “Genius Grant”) and two Drama Desk awards – is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University, where she teaches in the Department of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts.

Thirty years after the riots, Smith said she still wonders, “Why are we the way we are? And why are we so antagonized by each other?” She believes, however, that there is still hope for better days.

“Hope is defined in the play by Cornel West, who believes that ‘Hope is active – you have to take a real leap, a leap of faith.'

“And then there’s Chekhov, who said, ‘I’m going to get up, and get things done.’ For me to look at a blank page, and sit down and turn on my recorder, takes a lot of hope,”  Smith said.

Being back at the A.R.T. makes her hopeful, she said.

“San Francisco’s Bay Area and Cambridge and the A.R.T. have always been good for my work,” she says. “I am excited to be coming back to Harvard. The A.R.T. audiences are always there for you. They are very awake.”

'Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992'

When: Aug. 28 through Sept. 24

Where: Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St, Cambridge

Cost: $25 and up

Info: 617-547-8300, or go to americanrepertorytheater.org

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This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992' coming to A.R.T.