Twilight: Los Angeles 1992
In Anna Deveare Smith's acclaimed one-woman show, later directed by George C. Wolfe on Broadway, Smith gives voice to 40 real-life “characters,” from a Korean grocer to a Hollywood agent and a juror. Her performance is an account of what and how these people spoke to her in hundreds of interviews. In a film adaptation that interweaves Smith’s virtuoso performance with documentary interviews and footage of then contemporary Los Angeles, award-winning director Marc Levin (Slam, Whiteboys, Thug Life in DC, Brick City, Street Time) deftly transforms Smith’s work from stage to screen.
This is a phenomenal work. In the wake of the Rodney King riots, Anna Deveare Smith went to Los Angeles to interview more than 300 people who witnessed or were part of the Los Angeles fabric at the time and in the aftermath. Part journalism, part oral history, all tour-de-force acting. Anna Deveare Smith brings the characters alive with difference and empathy, with the script a pinnacle of documentary theater (i.e. all the words are taken exactly from the transcripts of oral history interviews).