Back in the 1990s, when I first saw Fires in the Mirror, a play about a conflict in which African Americans and Orthodox Jews battled in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I wanted to meet Anna Deavere Smith.

That play was amazing, it broke new ground and introduced like a mini-explosion a talented, gifted, completely unfazed-by-anything playwright-actress, a do-everything, want-to-know-everything kind of woman. Smith played all the parts—community activists, some of them familiar in the headlines, rabbis, students, neighborhood angry young men, the victims, the agitators, the angry citizens and residents of a place where two very different cultures collided. [Read more...]