How can one play make you low in spirit but high on life?
In less than two hours, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 takes you on a whip-smart ride between sadness that race and class issues remain unchanged since the 1992 Rodney King verdict and uprising—and in some ways are actually worse—and exhilaration at witnessing fine acting and characters that give you that smallest shred of hope.
Director Paige Hernandez displays the generous heart that marks her stage performances in guiding and trusting actor Danielle A. Drakes to conjure myriad characters at the drop of a hat, the slouch of a shoulder, a squint or a shrug.[ezcol_1third]
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Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
closes March 17, 2019
Details and tickets
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Drakes populates Debra Kim Sivigny’s urban, junk-strewn set with witnesses who were there when Los Angeles was caught in that limbo playwright Anna Deavere Smith calls “twilight—neither night or day, darkness or light.”
Smith spent nine months conducting more than 200 interviews with people of all ages, ethnicities, economic and power levels about the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the fallout from the verdict that acquitted three of the four LAPD officers (the jury failed to reach a verdict on the fourth officer) who beat Rodney King during his arrest for fleeing and evading the law, a violent act that was filmed by a local resident.
The verdict resulted in six days of rioting that left 63 people dead and almost 2,400 injured. Control was re-established over the broken city when the National Guard, United States Army and United States Marine Corps stepped in. There was a separate civil rights case pursued in federal district court in 1993, with two of the officers found guilty and sentenced to prison, and two acquitted of charges. King was awarded $3.8 million in damages by the city of Los Angeles. He died in 2012.
Smith takes a journalistic approach to adapting these interviews and stories to the stage for Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Voices overlap, stories contradict or build on one another, but through it all Smith remains impartial—just giving everyone equal say, equal weight and letting the words speak for themselves.
As Drakes confidently and restlessly prowls the stage, she grabs a hat to become a security guard bristling with bravado over perpetuating violence during the riots, softens her demeanor to become a clerk typist and witness to the King beating, and tautens with anxiety playing a Latino sculptor and painter fearing for his sons’ lives every time they leave the house.
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Clad in an Everyman costume of a linen tunic and pants, Drakes transforms into scholar Cornel West, whose definition of hope is so erudite and sorrowful you just want to pat his sheepskin, a Korean shopkeeper who lost her livelihood in the riots and swallows her anger like bitter melon, or the get-out-of-my-way force of Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
Drakes masterfully weaves each story and voice so it pieces together not the whole truth, but a diversity of truths that makes you wonder if America will ever transcend its race and inequality crisis to become a whole nation.
This production also hits home in troubling ways. In Baltimore it is 2019, but in my city’s post-Freddie Gray era, we are Los Angeles circa 1992 minus the palm trees. Police use excessive force in arrests, racial profiling is alive and well, and the city is more sharply, painfully divided between the haves and have nots than ever. In more ways than one we are “The City that Bleeds”–blood on the streets, blood on our hands.
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith . Director: Paige Hernandez. Featuring: Danielle A. Drakes . Scenic Design: Debra Kim Sivigny. Costume Design: Jessica Welch. Lighting Design: Sarah Tundermann. Sound Design: Hope Villanueva. Properties Design: Kasey Hendricks. Projection Design: Sarah Tundermann. Dramaturg: Lisa A. Wilde. Vocal/Dialect Coach: BettyAnn Leeseberg-Lange. Production Stage Manager: Julie DeBakey Smith. Produced by Rep Stage . Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
