Twilight: Los Angeles 1992.

• Author: Blanchard, Bob
• Position: Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, California

Anna Deavere Smith is a playwright and actress who has combined the traditions of theater and journalism in a powerful new way, and in the process she has virtually invented a new art form.

Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, her elegant one-woman show, broke box-office records and generated extraordinary praise when it opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles last summer.

Smith, forty-two, a Stanford theater professor, spent nine months interviewing 175 Los Angeles residents about the Los Angeles riots. She then distilled her material down to twenty-six vividly etched monologues, using excerpts from her interviews. The result is a stunning theatrical documentary that depicts the aftermath of urban riots and the anguished soul of a city - and a nation - in crisis.

What makes Twilight so compelling and incisive is the array of voices Smith presents, ranging from victims of violence to shopkeepers, looters, gang members, cops, jurors, and such public figures as former police chief Daryl Gates and truck driver Reginald Denny.

In the show, a former Black Panther instructs a militant about armed struggle: "If you just want to die and become a poster, go ahead, do that." A Korean woman speaks haltingly in her second language of hospital visits to her husband, partially lobotomized by a rioter's bullet: "At night, and all day long, and I spend all my time and in my heart for him." A Hollywood talent agent struggles to make sense of the riots: "And the people who were the |they' who were burning down the Beverly Center had been victims of the system. Whether well-intentioned or not, somebody got short shrift, and they did. And I started to absorb a little guilt and say, |Uh, I deserve ... I deserve it.' " A juror in the second Rodney King trial describes the jury overcoming its mutual hostilities in an emotional catharsis like "an A.A. meeting." A hurt and angry Reginald Denny condemns racism: "I just want people to wake up."

"I see my work as a call," Smith told me recently. "It asks for a response. It's about capturing unheard voices. And it's about reiterating heard voices in a different way than they have been processed in the media."

As a tribute to the intelligence and compassion of Smith's work, Twilight has been embraced by essentially all elements of the multicultural Los Angeles political community.

"It's actually very difficult to fully conceive of what our race problem is," Smith says. "If my work is respected, it's because I'm presenting...