Almost immediately, rumors spread that an ambulance, privately run by the Hasidim, had taken the driver and his fellow passengers to the hospital, while the young black children lay bleeding on the ground.
That night, a group of young black men retaliated by stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Orthodox Jewish scholar from Australia, who eventually died in the same hospital as Gavin. Over the next three days, a race riot erupted, in which black residents protested the police, stormed the Lubavitcher headquarters, and targeted Jewish businesses. Hasidic patrols sought to defend their community by attacking their black neighbors.
Shortly afterward, the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith began interviewing black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights, as well as creative artists and community leaders. She managed to talk to those most personally affected by the tragedies, too, including Yankel Rosenbaum’s brother, Norman, and Gavin Cato’s father, Carmel.
“Fires in the Mirror,” a one-woman show based on the interviews, was set to premiere at the Public Theater on April 30, 1992. But the day before, when a mostly white jury acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, the Public briefly closed over fears of racial violence.
In May, “Fires in the Mirror,” which had Smith playing nearly 30 real-life characters, debuted to rave reviews. What makes the show “so moving and provocative, so remarkably free of cant and polemics,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, “is its creator’s ability to find the unexpected and unguarded in nearly each speaker and her objective grasp of the troubling big picture.”
In subsequent versions, even the one filmed in 1993 for “American Playhouse” on PBS, Smith changed the sequencing but continued to do the performance as a one-woman show.
Until now.
Opening on Nov. 11 at the Signature Theater Company, “Fires in the Mirror” stars Michael Benjamin Washington (“The Boys in the Band”), the first solo actor besides Smith to take on this multifaceted role. Saheem Ali (“The Rolling Stone”) is the director.
The production kicks off Smith’s Signature residency; her “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” on the riots there, will be revived later in its season.
In a lively interview at the theater last week, Smith and Washington talked about what a male actor brings to the play, his appreciation for the fluidity of her characters and what the play still has to teach us about race and American identity. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Q: Anna, I read an interview in which you described being disappointed when a man came up to you after an early performance and told you, “I wish that a male actor had been cast.” How did that impact how you approached this revival?
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: This was when it was at the Public Theater. This brother came over and said: “You know, I’m just curious. Didn’t you meet any strong, black man that you wanted to include?” I was like: “Strong black men? Well, how about Mr. Cato? How about Conrad Muhammad, whether you agree with him or not. You can’t say he’s not strong. How about Al Sharpton?” I thought, “Oh, for him, if he doesn’t see the black male body, he’s not seeing himself.” And so I don’t count either. There is this feeling that only a black man could be a black man. That’s not philosophically where I live.
When we went looking for an individual who was going to play this part, everyone assumed it was going to be a woman. But I wanted to see if it makes a difference to have the presence of a black male body onstage. So I campaigned for them to see men as well as women in casting.
Q: Michael, you play so many characters — a Haitian teenage girl, an anonymous Lubavitcher woman, Angela Davis, and black and Jewish adolescent boys. Were you at all concerned with taking on so many different types at once?
MICHAEL BENJAMIN WASHINGTON: Not at all. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, “Fires in the Mirror” was a piece that we did on the circuit of our high school speech and debate competitions in 1994 and 1995. It was part of our training to become as fluid as possible, to play men and women and different races and ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations. So when I got this part, it was like a return home.
Q: Back then, it was considered part-journalism, part-theater. Now can we just call it a play?
SMITH: I’m happy to hear you call it a play. I’ve always wanted other actors to do this work. My early work had 20 actors in a group, and I was working toward having an acting troupe that would go around America and mirror cities and their incidents. What you see now came out of that process.
WASHINGTON: Dramaturgically, it’s one of the soundest plays I’ve ever read. Every time I read it, which is every morning and every night, I find another thread in the tapestry that connects the themes. And since I didn’t have access to all the tape recordings, because some of them no longer exist, I get to use my imagination. What’s important to remember is that she was able to write it down on the page in poem form. If you follow the line breaks, which is following the logic of the thought, you can hear the person come alive.
Q: This play was performed at a really contentious moment in American history. How do you think it stands today?
SMITH: My theory about race in this country is it goes up and down. We have this period — “Oh, post-racial” — and then all of a sudden: “Oh, no. We’re not!” But I think it’s always there. When Richard Green [the former director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective] says, “These kids are running to cops with nothing in their hands,” that distinct image makes me think of right now.
WASHINGTON: Yeah. I would usually have a breakdown at that moment in the rehearsal room, and I was like, “Nope, you’ve got to keep going because these men lived it.”
SMITH: It breaks your heart. Right?
WASHINGTON: It does. But they would fight through that emotionality and go into action. Even Mr. Cato at the very end, he’s telling his story, but you can tell that he is not going to be victimized. He’s going to figure out what he has to do to overcome.
SMITH: I also think the Jewish people have to always be on guard. Anti-Semitism could appear any time.
WASHINGTON: It was really spooky last Tuesday night [the show is currently in previews]. There was a voice-over of Clarence Thomas talking about being a victim of “high-tech lynching,” and the audience collectively gasped because Trump’s own lynching comment was trending.
Q: We rarely get to hear such a wide range of people disagreeing with each other at the same time. What are you saying about democracy?
WASHINGTON: We’re putting characters on a stage that just aren’t there normally, people who aren't given voices. And that was 25 years ago. That was so revolutionary. And it still is.
SMITH: I revere difference. How do we meet the stranger? With hatred or kindness? Do we all become the same? I say no.
This article originally appeared in
.