Hodgepodge 79/365 - Anna Deavere Smith

We've been watching Nurse Jackie. Tonight: the second half of season 2. Yep, that's six episodes. We like it that the episodes are only 28 minutes long. Makes binge-watching easy.

I adore Edie Falco, whom I missed in The Sopranos because, we didn't watch The Sopranos. Though I'd like to. Maybe one day I/we will.

A still from her TED Talk
Four American Characters
also part of On the Road (see below)

But even more, I adore Anna Deavere Smith, whom I remember from her ca. 1990 performances based on interviews. Like Fires in the Mirror, about the Crown Heights riots of 1991. Monologues taken directly from transcripts of interviews that Smith conducted with the people depicted in her one-woman play.  

Nurse Jackie isn't exactly frivolous, but it's entertainment. Fires in the Mirror was not meant to be entertainment. And what about Anna Deavere Smith, an African American woman, presenting the stories of a great diversity of people—including male Hassidic Jews? There's an interesting head bender. (One I agree with. How are we going to understand each other if we can't try to exercise some empathy? We may be not entirely right in our conclusions, but at least we try. We try.)

Anna Deavere Smith was bold. She was (is) just one person, shaped in her own way, so we may not agree with her interpretations. But I admire her chutzpah in taking on this event.

Here's the Wikipedia description of Fires in the Mirror:

Anna Deavere Smith's play Fires in the Mirror is a part of her project On the Road: A Search for the American Character. It is a series of monologues excerpted from interviews. Fires in the Mirror chronicles a civic disturbance in the New York neighborhood of Crown Heights in August 1991. In that racially divided neighborhood, a car driven by a Jewish man veered onto a sidewalk and killed a 7-year-old Caribbean-American boy who was learning to ride a bicycle. The accident and the delayed response of emergency medical personnel sparked protests during which a Jewish student visiting from Australia was stabbed on the street by a group of black youths. Days of rioting ensued, exposing to national scrutiny the depth of the racial divisions in Crown Heights. The rioting produced 190 injuries, 129 arrests, and an estimated one million dollars in property damage.

Smith interviewed leading politicians, writers, musicians, religious leaders, and intellectuals together with residents of Crown Heights and participants in the disturbances to craft the monologues of her play. Through the words of 26 different people, in 29 monologues, Smith explores how and why people signal their identities, how they perceive and respond to people different from themselves, and how barriers between groups can be breached. "My sense is that American character lives not in one place or the other," Smith writes in her introduction to the play, "but in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences." The title of the play suggests a vision of art as a site of reflection where the passions and fires of a specific moment can be examined from a new angle, contemplated, and better understood.

Here is the link to Fires in the Mirror (a playlist of six videos). I am going to watch it again. I expect it will speak to our current situation, eloquently.