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    A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles,1992"
    A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles,1992"
    A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles,1992"
    Ebook52 pages52 minutes

    A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles,1992"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles,1992," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535841689
    A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles,1992"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight - Gale

      3

      Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

      Anna Deavere Smith

      1993

      Introduction

      Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is the fourteenth part of Anna Deavere Smith’s work in progress, On the Road: A Search for American Character, begun in 1983. The play’s unifying focus is the civil unrest in Los Angeles following the April, 1992, verdict in the first Rodney King trial, presented from the perspective of the wide range of persons that Smith interviewed. The actress-playwright interprets a limited number of these actual people in her solo performances, editing and rearranging her raw material as she deems appropriate.

      Although she conducted about 175 interviews for the project, in her one-woman performances Smith limits her dramatis personae to between twenty-five and forty-five personalities, depending on her production venue. Her choices have varied as Smith has worked on her command of the diverse people that she represents.

      Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 began its premier run on May 23, 1993, in Los Angeles, at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum, which had commissioned the work. It received almost unanimous critical acclaim, and it has since gained favorable notice in subsequent productions in Princeton, New Jersey, and in New York, Washington, D. C., and London, England. It has also garnered several honors, including Obie, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle awards and two Antoinette Perry nominations.

      Although Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the Pulitzer jury disqualified it on the grounds that it was not fictional and could only be performed by the interviewer-playwright herself. More than anything else, that decision reflects a critical inability to pigeonhole the work into some familiar category. The play’s kinship with the documentary is unquestioned, but it simply escapes any easy classification. Its intention is clear, however; the piece documents a critical time of racial division and civil unrest, not to place blame for what happened, but to help the process of healing through a kaleidoscopic and sympathetic rendering of different viewpoints.

      Author Biography

      In On the Road: A Search for American Character, the series of plays to which Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 belongs, Anna Deavere (Duh-veer) Smith set out, as she says, to capture the personality of a place by attempting to embody its varied population and varied points of view in one person—myself. Her series is a work-in-progress, its aim being the isolation of the American character through the dramatization of its many voices, the different people who are shaping it. But her quest is partly a voyage of self-discovery, too, a shaping of her own role as a black woman writer, actress, and teacher.

      Anna Deavere Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 18, 1950, the oldest child of Deavere Smith and Anna Young Smith. Her father owned a coffee and tea business, and her mother was an elementary school principal. During her early years, Anna’s upbringing was largely restricted to a segregated community, giving her few opportunities to meet the various kinds of people that she would later depict in her plays. However, she did sharpen one skill for which she seemed to have a natural gift—mimicry. That talent earned her a reputation as a bit of a

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