Prompt 11 on Smith Fires in the Mirror

First, a few words about Anna Deavere Smith: she's a world-famous performance artist whom you've probably also seen in bit parts in West Wing episodes and movies like The American President and Dave. Fires in the Mirror was her first really breakthrough, national-attention-getting work, though she had been active and well-known in smaller circles for some time.

Smith's signature technique involves conducting interviews with various people--nationally known figures, regular people, outside experts--involved in some event or issue. She films these interviews--but only for herself. Smith then practices repeating the words, gestures, and even nonverbal tics of her subjects until she "has" that person with as much fidelity and accuracy as she can muster. Editing and arranging her interviews into a show, Smith then performs all of the interviews as a series of monologues. The effect is something akin to a living, one-person documentary performance. For an example of Smith's latest work about health care, Let Me Down Easy, see here. (Really, it's worthwhile to watch at least a few of the segments just so you have a sense of what she does.)

Fires in the Mirror is about the 1991 Crown Heights Riots in Brooklyn between members of the Black community and members of the Lubavich sect of Orthodox Judaism that live there. You can familiarize yourself with the basics of the riots. Smith also relates these events from several different perspectives.

There's an old filmed version of her performing Fires in the Mirror (in six parts on Youtube here). The effect here, however, is much different. Rather than filming her stage show, the filmmakers stage each monologue as a separate, fully-realized scene with it's own props and costumes. You lose a bit of the theatrical impact of watching Smith transform in seconds before your eyes. Still, you might find some of these monologues helpful as you read.

Whether you watch the Youtube of her or not, though, I of course want you to read the play. The impact of Smith's performance technique--these are people's real words! It's like watching a documentary!--can sometimes cause us to forget that Fires in the Mirror is still a play. Smith is not a neutral recorder but a playwright who has selected, edited, and arranged the monologues she stages. The questions we pose about any script still work here:

• What parts of the story does she include in the plot? (choice) 
• What effect does Smith's ordering of events/interviews have? (sequence)
• What motifs are there in the play? What images or ideas get foreshadowed/reflected? (progression)
• Where and how does the tempo change? (tempo)
• Where and how does tension change in this play? When and how is tension created, raised, or released? (rhythm)
• What events, images, or ideas get the most stage time? What gets very little stage time? (duration)
• Where does appearance clearly conflict with reality? Where is reality ambiguous? Where is it complex?

For this prompt, consider the following hypothetical situation: imagine you're part of a professional theatre company (hurrah employment!). The artistic director of your company wishes to stage Fires in the Mirror. The thing is, she doesn't see the use of the first section of the play in which Smith interviews figures not directly related to the Crown Heights events itself. This director would basically like to start the play with Robert Sherman's "Lousy Language"--arguably the first monologue specifically about Crown Heights and the situation there.

Act as a dramaturg here and advocate for performing all of Smith's text. Make the argument for what these first monologues do dramaturgically. Justify their inclusion in Fires in the Mirror and discuss what would be lost by cutting them out. You yourself may not at first see why Smith includes these sections. Challenge yourself to find and defend a reason.

See you on Monday,

JF