blueprints

46 | anna deavere smith
After all I have said about the possibility that was reawakened in me
when I wrote and performed Fires in the Mirror, I will give here a word of
caution. The play, in terms of mirroring community and bringing community
together, was enormously successful. But did I change any opinions or
beliefs at the epicenters? Did I change opinions or behaviors of any
Lubavitch? Did I change opinions or behaviors of black activists? Unlikely.
On opening night, Roz Malamud, quoted above, came to see the play. She
was very excited by it. When the reviews came out she called me at my
home to congratulate me and to invite me to her home for “a nice kosher
meal.” A year after the play opened, I was invited to perform the play in a
theater quite near Crown Heights. Blacks and Jews from the community
attended, including black leaders and key rabbis. The brother of Yankel
Rosenbaum, Norman Rosenbaum, who is depicted in the play, attended.
The accomplishment there is that blacks and Jews sat side by side in the
theater. However, I would never say that I changed any minds—I am not
certain of and cannot account for change at all. When 60 Minutes took me
back into the neighborhood to do a profile on my work, Roz Malamud,
who had privately called me from time to time to invite me to come to her
home (for her grandson’s bris, for example), said of me on national television,
“What does she know? She’s not from here.” So, it seems, Roz and I
have to agree to disagree. But at least we are talking. And maybe that’s
something.
Did my speaking the language night after night, inside darkened theaters
around this country, and in Australia and London, change anything? To
answer this question, one would have to chronicle the behavior of audiences,
once dispersed back into communities and their workplaces. Did it
change their voting, their purchasing, their imagining, their relationships?
Likewise in Los Angeles, when I performed Twilight: Los Angeles, about
the Los Angeles riots and the hostilities between communities and those
who policed the communities, I succeeded in bringing communities into
the theater. I broke box office records. But did I change anything? The process
itself broke holes in big walls—my own walls included. One of my
muses was a gang member—Twilight Bey was his name. I interviewed over
three hundred people: a gang member on the one hand, a patrician, southern
aristocrat who was editor of the Los Angeles Times on the other. One of
the police officers who had beaten Rodney King met with me. I met with
jurors from both trials, including a juror from the jury that voted not to