Overview

Signature Theatre

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Anna Deavere Smith

Elena Hurst 
Francis Jue 
Wesley T. Jones 
Karl Kenzler 
Tiffany Rachelle Stewart

Riccardo Hernández

Linda Cho

Alan C. Edwards

Darron L West

David Bengali

Michael Leon Thomas

Dawn-Elin Fraser

Ann James

Charles M. Turner III

Caparelliotis Casting
X Casting

Blake Zidell & Associates

Beth Whitaker

Glenn Alan Stiskal

Rochelle Torres

Paul Ziemer

Iyvon E.

Jeffrey Bledsoe

Taibi Magar

Signature Theatre was founded in 1991 by James Houghton

Note from Anna Deavere Smith

Gathering

How could such a brutal beating, captured on videotape and replayed all over the world, for a year, be categorized as within bounds of “a reasonable use of force”? And what was a “reasonable use of force” anyway? George Holliday, whose wife was the first in their household to hear Rodney King’s screams, was on their balcony, still coltish with the handling of his recently purchased Sony Video8 Handycam CCD-F77. Shaky, blurred and grainy it was, but the late Holliday’s footage should have gotten a Pulitzer Prize. It revealed, worldwide, that which Americans who lived in police-controlled war zones experienced every day. The rest of the US populace had been suddenly, to use a contemporary term, “woke.” 

Twenty-eight years later, a cell phone captured in color, without blur, George Floyd being choked to death. Seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board for “courageously recording the video of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.” On April 20, 2021, in spite of the power of Frazier’s video, few people took for granted that Derek Michael Chauvin would be declared guilty on three charges, including third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. And he was. Much has happened in America since 1992. And much has not. 

In the spring of 1992, the late Gordon Davidson, Artistic Director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, was among those in the audience for my play Fires in the Mirror, which I was performing in New York during the days weeks and months following the Los Angeles riots. Fires had a sold-out run throughout the summer and into the beginning of fall. It may not have without the Los Angeles riots having happened. You see, we are only interested in race in ‘spells.’ The wake of the Los Angeles riots was such a spell. It was not immediately apparent to me or to Gordon that the Los Angeles riots should be a source of my next play. By the end of breakfast—at, of all places, the Algonquin in New York—we concluded that I should head west in the fall of ’92 to begin a series of interviews. I flew down from San Francisco on weekends in the ensuing eight months and interviewed about 320 people. By May of 1993, I was on stage in LA performing a solo show based on those 320 interviews. 

The dense and diverse histories of Angelenos are operatic in scale. Academic and cultural race fashion at the time was focused on the Black/white paradigm. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where the lines of segregation were and still are organized along the Black/white binary. I had taught at USC, yet I had no idea of the diversity to be found in crevices of neighborhoods, in mammoth churches in basements, suburbs I’d never been to, municipal buildings I’d never visited, wealth I’d never seen in Beverly Hills, and elsewhere. I was exposed for the first time to threads and weaves in the ragged tapestry of American identities I couldn’t have imagined. To parse strands of these threads, I invited thought partners (dramaturgs) of four races to join me in emotional, sometimes discordant conversations, always intellectually vigorous, as I wrote the play. Revising Twilight from a solo show to one for the five extraordinary actors performing tonight has been a rich experience. They made present the magnificent language that real people shared with me nearly thirty years ago. I peered anew at the broken, unwoven, never woven threads of America’s tapestry.

Twilight Bey, a former member of the LA Crips gang, after whom I named the play, equates living within the forts and barricades of one’s tribal identity to living in darkness. He concludes: 

I can’t forever dwell in darkness.  
I can’t forever dwell in the idea,  
just identifying with people like me, and understanding me and  
mine.

Twilight was talking about a humanizing project, one that reared up for a brief time after the LA riot. In the wake of the riot, calls for “honest conversations about race” were rampant. But we swiftly realized that we could not talk our way into equity and opportunity, we could not talk our way into ending police brutality, we could not talk our way out of institutionalized racism, we could not talk our way out of the increasing wealth gap, we could not talk our way into better schools, better health care, and we could not we talk our way into a successful humanizing project.

Where might we house a new humanizing project? Dehumanizing untruths are unbreakable. We learned a long time ago that we can’t pray our way out of the consequences of those untruths. Secular we stand. Academia and the arts have promised to humanize us. But you see that it lacks humility. In the arts, in entertainment and in education, hierarchy, not equity, prevails. And as a result of the pandemic and the awakening after George Floyd’s murder, those institutions are in the midst of an urgent and necessary renovation. So, where might we house a new humanizing project?

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 asks implicitly if not explicitly, “How shall we gather?” Note, the question is not “How can we come together?” Because coming together suggests agreement, and discord is essential in the humanizing project at the moment because it’s real.

There’s a weaver I interviewed some years ago. She talked about “warp” threads. The warp thread holds the tension while you weave. She would deliberately break the warp thread. Breaking the warp thread was courageous, but the result was magnificently beautiful. Perhaps if we look closely at the breaks, we will find moments of inspiring beauty. And that beauty might call some of us, from out behind our barricades and forts to gather. I don’t expect everyone to gather. Others will guard their forts. And I respect that they may have a reason to do so.

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Note from Dr. Elizabeth Alexander

President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is a significant historic work of art exquisitely timed for 2021.

Though created nearly 30 years ago, Twilight’s prescience lies in its power to capture that past moment of social strife and conflict in Los Angeles while also conveying revelations about our current troubling era.

I was honored to work as a dramaturg on that first unforgettable production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in LA. Working in the ashes of Los Angeles in the post-uprising aftermath of the Rodney King trial verdict, I watched with amazement as one visionary—Anna Deavere Smith—interviewed Angelenos from different communities who were not in productive conversation with each other.

She would bring those voices back to the dramaturgical collective, and together we would listen and talk and argue and learn as we heard the truths the voices revealed. Then she took the generative richness that emerged and made it into the extraordinary play we have today.

At that same time, Anna Deavere Smith was learning every part, studying the various languages included in the script, and physically training to inhabit the characters she would bring to life on stage—each one of whom communicated through her alone.

Now, in another time of strife and hopefulness, a team of actors is once more bringing us these voices and making community where there must be community.

It is our great fortune to experience Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 again.

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Community Agreement

Our home, The Pershing Square Signature Center, was built upon the values of community, access and belonging. Regardless of why or how often you come, you are part of the Signature community, which includes your fellow audience members, visitors, artists and staff. When entering this shared space, we ask that you take part in our community agreement to: 

1. Acknowledge, accept and encourage varied experiences and cultural responses to our work. 
2. Appreciate that we all enter this space for many purposes, and to respect the physical and psychological space that you and others take. 

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The Company

(in order of appearance)

Tiffany Rachelle Stewart
Karl Kenzler
Elena Hurst
Francis Jue
Wesley T. Jones
 

PROLOGUE

HISTORIES/ENEMIES

THE STORY OF LATASHA HARLINS

NO JUSTICE NO PEACE

THE STORY OF RODNEY KING

THE PEOPLE OF THE STAGE OF CALIFORNIA V. LAURENCE M. POWELL, TIMOTHY E. WIND, THEODORE J. BRISENO, AND STACEY C. KOON
VERDICT – APRIL 29, 1992

ROCKED

ACT TWO

LOSSES

THE STORY OF REGINALD DENNY AND PAUL PARKER

A DINNER PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED

JUSTICE

TWILIGHT

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Staff

Credits

Global Scenic Services

Footage featured in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 courtesy of:
ABC7 Los Angeles
Los Angeles City Archives - Office of the City Clerk
The CONUS Archive
Rodney King Beating Video ©1991 by George Holliday, U.S. Copyright Registration No. PA0000518451/1991-05-15
Global ImageWorks, LLC.
LPE360. All rights reserved. Used under license.
Getty Images/ NBC New Archives
Timothy Goldman
Global Scenic Services
Drew Bachrach 
Pond5 
Storyblocks 

The Actors and Stage Managers employed in this production are members of Actors' Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.

United Scenic Artists, Local USA 829 of the IATSE is the union representing scenic, costume, lighting, sound and projection designers in Live Performance.

The Director and/or Choreographer is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a national theatrical labor union.

Administrative Staff

Signature Theatre Administrative Staff Listing

Playwrights-in-Residence

Signature Theatre Playwrights-in-Residence Listing
 

THANK YOU

Signature Theatre gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the following contributors. The following listing is inclusive of Annual Gala support.

Support for the Signature Ticket Initiative: A Generation of Access is provided by:

Lead support

Additional support provided by

Signature Theatre’s 2021-22 Season is sponsored by

SigSpace is generously supported by

Signature Theatre programs are supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural A­airs in partnership with the City Council and Council Speaker Corey Johnson. Signature’s programming is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

                                 

Board of Trustees

Edward Norton, Chairman
Douglas E. Chittenden, President
Susan Weiner, Treasurer
Richard E. Willett, Secretary

Margot Adams
Bernard L. Dikman
Paige Evans
David S. Klafter
Lori Kramer
Timothy G. Little
Nina B. Matis
Christine Millen
Dominique Morisseau
Lila Neugebauer
Nancy Northup
Laura Pels
Michael Rauch
Donna Walker-Kuhne

James Houghton, Founder*
Diane Morrison, Chairman Emeritus
Molly O'Neil Frank, President Emeritus
Sally Strachan, President Emeritus
Richard M. Ticktin, Esq., Chairman Emeritus*
Edward Albee, Trustee & Resident Playwright *

*In memoriam

The Pershing Square Signature Center Project Team

Design Architect…Gehry Architects, New York, PC
Architect of Record…H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture
Owner’s Representative… Jonathan Rose Companies
Developer…Related Companies
Theatre Consultant…Auerbach Pollock Friedlander
Construction Manager… Structure Tone
Legal… Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP

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Our Supporters

LEADERSHIP CIRCLE

MATCHING GIFTS

Please note that this listing is current as of October 1, 2021. We apologize for any inaccuracies; please contact us with corrections at patrons@signaturetheatre.org.

To learn more about our individual giving programs, please visit us here.

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