Feature: TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES at Rubicon Theatre

Where were you and what were you doing when the not guilty verdict came in from the Rodney King trial? If you were old enough to be aware of current events in 1992, you could not avoid TV news as it seared images of fires, beatings, looting, and general upheaval into everyone's minds. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a dramatic depiction of the events surrounding the trial, will be presented by the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the infamous verdict.

The jury's not-guilty verdict shocked many who felt that the evidence against the police could not have been more undeniable. After all, the proof had manifested in nearly 10 minutes of video in black and white, capturing the certain reality that Rodney King, lying helpless on the ground, received blow after blow from the policemen's batons. Around that time, playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith decided to include the trial and the related events in her grand project, On the Road: A Search for the American Character. For Twilight, Deavere Smith was committed to documenting the diversity of interpretations of the events of the trial, subsequent civil unrest, and underlying racial strife. She conducted 175 interviews for the play, paring down to the most poetic subjects for the final script.

The result was a drama that turned the event from the media's single representation to the multitudinous responses of individuals of all walks of life. When I interviewed the actor Chris Butler who is taking on the one-person performance of this show, he said he will present all the characters--from the young African American men of South Los Angeles to the elderly Korean-Americans--with "reverence and fearlessness."

The diversity of the characters is intrinsic to the meaning of the play, however, when so many characters are conjured by the playtext, unconnected to back-and-forth dialogue between characters, it tests an actor's power of memorization. It's much simpler to respond to the prompt of another actor's lines or to follow the causal lines of events in a plot.

Butler described how Twilight builds bridges of empathy across people from widely different backgrounds and with varied agendas, remarking that the performance will "make people feel encouraged and leave them with a desire to participate in a society." One thing I'm particularly anticipating is seeing how Rubicon's artistic team will craft a dramatic arc when so many lines of development are possible.

Twilight's structure suggests that truth can only be gathered by diversifying one's perspective. To achieve this effect, Butler will transform the characters of Twilight from the constraints of their original presentation as Deavere Smith's straightforward imitations of the interviewees as she remembered them. Deavere Smith had believed that truth and character are best revealed in the stammering lacunas of expression when one's words fail. This production will reanimate gaps in meaning where character resides with wholly original inventions in a panoply of idioms from the actor and director Jenny Sullivan's imaginations.

 

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