“Still Burning”
Anna
Deavere Smith’s sterling career as an actress, playwright, speaker, and
academic took off like a rocket when, in 1992, she conceived, wrote, and performed
her remarkable one-person docudrama, Fires in the Mirror.
(She followed in 1994 with the similarly successful Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992.)The still relevant Fires in the Mirror, absent its original subtitle, Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, is now getting a first-class revival at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Linney Courtyard Theatre. Surprisingly, what was once a one-woman play is now a one-man play in the supple, chameleon-like hands of Michael Benjamin Washington (The Boys in the Band).
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| Michael Benjamin Washington. All photos: Joan Marcus. |
Smith, awarded the National Humanities Medal by Pres. Obama
in 2013, created a new type of documentary theatre with Fires in the Mirror.
In it, she wove together verbatim passages recorded in interviews with multiple
figures directly and indirectly involved with the riots that erupted in Brooklyn’s
Crown Heights community in 1991. The spark that lit the fires of racial rage
and anti-Semitic conflict was an accident in which a car carrying the
Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson ran a red light, causing the driver to lose control and fatally
hit an eight-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato.
The circumstances surrounding and following the accident bore
great social and political consequences. Among the ingredients simmering in the
dangerous brew were the reactions of the responding ambulances, secular and
religious; the violent behavior of the crowd at the site; the fate of the
never-punished driver, the retaliatory murder of a young, Australian,
rabbinical scholar; the actions of the police; and the participation by civil
rights, religious, and political leaders in the inflammatory discourse that
ensued. 
Smith’s interviewees, who ranged across the social,
religious, and political spectrum, appear within a structure divided into seven
sections: Identity, Mirrors, Hair, Race, Rhythm, Seven Verses, and, most extensively,
Crown Heights, Brooklyn August 1991. Within these, we meet 26 people, each with
their own subtitled segment, ranging from, for example, playwright Ntzoke Shange and an anonymous
Lubavitcher woman in Identity, to physicist Aron M. Bernstein in Mirrors, to a
black, teenage girl and the Rev. Al Sharpton in Hair, to activist Angela Davis
in Race, to rapper Monique “Mo” Matthews in Rhythm, to Minister Conrad Mohammed
and Jewish author Letty Cottin Pogrebin in Seven Verses, to 15 individuals,
culminating with Carmel Cato, Gavin’s father, in the final section.
Many of these people are little known today, others like
Sharpton remain in the public eye. Numerous others are mentioned but don’t
appear (other than in the many video projections designed by Hannah Wasileski),
their identities clarified in the helpful listing provided in the program insert,
which also carries notes by Smith and a timeline of events. 
Smith’s sequence of speakers, some with personal stories (the
Holocaust is referenced), cover the situation from multiple perspectives, expressing
the concerns of both the black and Jewish communities of Crown Heights, and
those of committed, outside observers from varying backgrounds. This exposes us
to a wide assortment of feelings and philosophies, anecdotes and assessments,
history and hysteria. Smith’s extraordinary achievement is to present her subjects
objectively, in their own words, and, as closely as possible, to their own
personas. 
I was so impressed by her original performance that, when it
appeared later on public television, I taped it and showed it to my students on
multiple occasions. It seemed unlikely that anyone else would ever match her
ability to so accurately express the voice, accent, personality, and manner of
so many disparate people, black and white. With Smith’s performance still vivid
in my mind, I was skeptical that Washington could match it. But, under Saheem
Ali’s pinpoint direction, he comes as close as humanly possible.
Washington, much darker-skinned than Smith, transforms himself
into a thoroughly convincing, Brooklyn-accented Lubavitcher woman, headscarf
and all, just as he replicates the rhetorical precision and physical mannerisms
of Louis Farrakhan supporter, Conrad Mohammed. For the latter, he does so down to the tapping of sugar
packets on a table, one of those utterly unforgettable bits of characterization
Smith created in the original.
Using minimal props and costume elements (the latter, added to
a white shirt and black pants, designed by Dede M. Ayite), Washington moves
about, under Alan C. Edwards’s sensitive lighting, on Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple
set backed by a mirrored wall on which words and images are projected. Mikaal
Sulaiman’s creative sound design adds immeasurably to the experience. 
Like Smith, his command of the multiplicity of accents is
awesome but, interestingly, he falls short in capturing the most recognizable
individual in her dramatis personae, Al Sharpton. Smith came much closer to
nailing Sharpton’s unique, boisterous delivery than does Washington. On the
other hand, his presentation of Carmel Cato talking about his son, as the tears
stream down his cheeks, is incomparably moving. 
No theatre season goes by without an assortment of solo
plays, some distinguished, some quickly extinguished. But few have had the political
and social impact of Fires in the Mirror. Audiences today may not recall
either the circumstances of what happened or those who took part in them, but
its themes continue to burn in our racially and ethnically diverse society,
where neighbors continue to struggle with the imperative to live and let live.
Pershing Square
Signature Center
480 W. 42nd
St., NYC
Through December 8