62 pages • 2 hours read
Anna Deavere SmithTwilight: Los Angeles, 1992
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Reginald Denny
Reginald Denny’s presence is unavoidable here. Short of Rodney King himself, Denny became the most visible face of the entire verdict/riot cycle. In acknowledgment of his central role, Smith places Denny’s lengthy testimony squarely in the middle of the play. Set up by the preceding two interviews—ground reporter Judith Tur’s “War Zone” and ex-gang member Allen Cooper’s “Bubble Gum Machine”—Denny must be reckoned with as a symbol, appropriate or misapplied, of white victimhood. That is one of the central themes that emerges from this collage of transcripts: the idea that somehow King’s victimhood—which exposed the victimhood of black America within a system of institutionalized racism—wound up getting completely subverted into a validation of whites’ fear of black America.
The fact of Denny’s whiteness before black aggressors suggested that both sides, black and white, were competing for the status of victimhood, both sides laying claim to being under siege. Tur offers a vivid sense of this, calling Denny’s assailants and onlookers “animals” and declaring her United States no longer recognizable. Counterposed to this, Allen Cooper, “Big Al,” simply reads the Denny incident as another media sideshow, a “joke,” that, like the Rodney King episode, skillfully diverts attention from the real structural problems confronting black America.
Between these views, Denny himself mediates. While not skilled in assessing social or political systems or addressing solutions to socioeconomic problems, Denny neither demonstrates a general fear of black society, nor even a condemnation of his specific attackers, nor does he shy from the need for more sweeping change. In his limited fashion, Denny resorts to a call for common humanity and for a state of colorblindness. He is more enraged by the presumed superiority and self-centeredness of fellow whites than by the men who attacked him. It is a sympathetic standpoint and a virtual revolution for a man who, hitherto, had blithely disregarded “what was going on in California or in America or anything” and who literally drove into a trap because he was unaware of the verdict and regarded it as not his problem. Denny, in a very potent way, discovered the opposite was true; it touched him personally, physically, and psychologically, but it also raised his awareness—as did the entire episode for the gamut of Americans caught within it and observing it from afar. One of the other key lessons, often maudlin, of the play is seizing on the incident as an opportunity, a “twilight” opportunity, to start anew, to draw new boundaries and/or erase the old ones altogether. For Denny that begins with his “happy room,” which will be a place of acceptance and fellow-feeling for all people, regardless of color.
Angela King
Angela King, as the voice of Rodney King and the leading voice of Act Two, “Here’s a Nobody,” discusses Rodney King’s childhood and offers a vision of African-American family culture at odds with the prevalent narratives of the inner-city ghetto. The vision of Rodney King we get is a pastoral one and the lessons imbibed by the King family were those of racial harmony. This sets up the notion that racial harmony and respect is not only possible, but that something has come undone. The very man caught in the snare of fraught black-white relations was a man who grew up in an environment that did not recognize the need for such fraught relations at all.
Yet in Angela King we also see the destructive potential of systemic racism not only upon blacks but upon one’s entire way of thinking. Angela King, who grew up in a trusting environment, has become embittered by and toward the mass media, the justice system, and the very possibility of harmonious race relations. Not naturally politically motivated, she does have a moral vision and now that lines have been crossed, ‘justice’ demands its place. Driven to act, in a sustained and political way, Angela King appears to be one of those many characters brought to enlightenment and/or activism by the cycle of violence pivoting about her nephew. And yet there is the element of “revenge” and distrust as well that is both a natural response but also painful to consider, for it suggests once more that Us-versus-Them thinking will not lead to the true and productive justice of cooperation and fellow-feeling. It is all the more poignant given that opening vision of racial harmony along the banks of the Sacramento. And it is a potent irony that the two most prominent victim-icons in the whole affair—Rodney King and Reginald Denny—should both be either inheritors or advocates of racial equality.
Maxine Waters
Congresswoman Maxine Waters presents two successive takes on the incident: one a speech given at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, the other an interview recalling a session in the White House. Waters offers something like an official version of the verdict/riots, the view of an elected official who has a platform and the authority to speak for “[her] people.”In two differing settings, to two divergent constituencies, Waters lifts the riots out of their temporal and spatial specificity and puts them in historical and geographical perspective. (Cornel West also speaks to this at length in “Bloodstained Banner,” as does Elaine Brown,in “Ask Saddam Hussein.”)
This is no singular event, in LA or anywhere else, but is the product of generations of “institutionalized racism” evident in cities all across the United States. Apart from their eloquence, Waters’ speech and interview manage to link the African-American community in LA—where they get her message—to the Washington power corridor, where they are completely uninformed about the message at all. Waters is in a unique positionto expose the divergences, as well as mediate between the two. She brings out of the shadows what “dropped off everyone’s agenda” and deposits them in the lap of the President of the United States. She proposes structural change from the policy wing.
These twin messages from Waters, variably speaking power to the truthful and truth to power, provide a glimpse into the thinking of a double insider. We learn, among other things, that her office in LA was burned down during the riots. By both personal and professional background, Waters is able to express both an African-American view from the community level and an official one as a member of the United States Congress.
Paul Parker
Paul Parker, who responds directly and caustically to the Reginald Denny sensation, self-consciously emerges as the anti-Denny in most respects. Happy to redraw the black-white divide, Parker offers a stunning rejoinder to Denny’s let’s-all-get-along vision and his “happy room,” with a vigilant display of Black Pride and a room devoted to the notion of No Justice No Peace.
In contrast to Denny’s soft and sappy vision of a room filled with “love and compassion and the funny notes and the letters from faraway places” (111), Parker’s room will be filled with “all my articles and clippings” and whatever else is necessary such that whoever enters “can just see what it takes to be a strong black man, what you gotta do for your people,” either standing or falling: “[y]ou either be black or you die” (177-78). The meaning couldn’t be clearer: “if there’s not justice here then we not gonna give them any peace. You know, we don’t have no peace” (178). Here justice is not the incremental, measured object it is for Michael Zinzun (“Nightvision”), but the vengeful justice hinted at by Angela King (“Here’s a Nobody”).
For Parker, the riots are nothing short of a windfall, helping restore “pride” in precisely the macho way Cornel West describes (“The Bloodstained Banner”): “We holdin’ our heads up and our chest out. We like yeah, brother, we did this! […] Basically it’s that you as black people ain’t takin’ this shit no more.” For Parker, who may well speak for many voiceless witnesses, it is a visceral, long-awaited response, an outpouring, and one which will soon be revisited, and similarly misunderstood, at the time of the O. J. Simpson verdict in 1995.
White Privilege
In the middle of the play, in Act Three (“War Zone”), comes a series of interviews which together might be called the voice of “White Privilege.” The trio (Anonymous Man #2, Elaine Young, and Anonymous Young Woman) is announced by Katie Miller (“That’s Another Story”) and her resentment over a white TV broadcaster’s point of focus on the impact of the riot on rich, white enclaves and is revisited, in Act Four (“Twilight”) by movie producer Paula Weinstein (“A Jungian Collective Unconscious”). The most wide-ranging, introspective, and speculative of these belongs to the “Anonymous Hollywood Agent,” whose viewpoint is further elevated by the figurative distance of his anonymity and also his place within the entertainment industry.
Much of the Hollywood agent’s recollection involves his questioning of, and bewilderment over, why his colleagues reacted so hysterically and just what it reveals about the disharmony between the races.The agent himself remains distant from the riot, however, as if he is a mere observer rather than participant. Equipped with self- and historical-awareness, he offers three basic insights: that there is a certain (if faulty) demarcation of “us” and “them”; that the riots arose not out of the blue but from long-standing structural iniquity; and that white people harbor a sense of guilt for this injustice.
The agent admits his own response involved a lot of “generic guilt”: “I was almost thinking: ‘Did I deserve this, do I, do I deserve it?’ I thought me, personally—no, me, generically, maybe so” (139). As he reflects on the inequality of “the system,” however, that would lead to such a violent outburst, he “started to absorb a little guilt and say, uh, ‘I deserve it, I deserve it!’”(140).This feeling derives from his understanding that the verdict (which he is quick to label “absurd”) was “just the spark—this had been set for years before” (140).
For it is perfectly clear that “the system plays unequally, 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 the short shrift, and they did […]”(140).Yet as he says “they,” he falls into a trap, of which he is also aware. Echoing Jason Sanford (“They”), the agent remembers somebody saying, “‘Did you hear? They’re burning down the Beverly Center.’” And“There is no who. Whaddya mean, who? No, just they […] Oh, okay, they[…] It almost didn’t matter, it’s irrelevant. Somebody. It’s not us!”(137-38).
That “us” did not, perhaps, “intentionally” work to produce inequality in “the system,” did not perhaps merit their houses being burned down, and yet “we” were an obvious target. The agent was not prepared for what happened next:pure “devastation,” a systematic failure so severe it left “people reduced to burning down their own neighborhoods. Burning down our neighborhoods I could see. But burning down their own—that was more dramatic to me” (141). Respondents like Paul Parker and Katie Miller may have a differing interpretation of what happened in South Central, but from the perspective of Hollywood, the drama of the lengths people might go to was perhaps a necessary lesson.
