The violence quickly escalated and later that evening Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish rabbinical student who was visiting from Australia, was murdered by a group of Black youths in retaliation for Cato's death. FIRES IN THE MIRROR is constructed from twenty-six monologues that are verbatim interviews that Smith conducted with a range of subjects including Gavin Cato's father, Yankel Rosenbaum's brother, Reverend Al Sharpton, and Aaron S. Bernstein (a physicist at M. I. T. ). He speaks out passionately in his first scene that there should be justice for his brother's murderers, and in his second scene, he describes his reaction to the news that Yankel had been killed. Close, wearing a variety of shimmering gowns for the occasion, including a blue-and-green number that made her look as if seaweed were growing up her arms, was a Tony winner herself (for a part in Death and the Maiden). The City Theatre's intimate (ca. One anonymous black man sees significance in the fact that the blue-and-white colors of New York police cars and Israeli flags are the same. She does not "act" the people you see and listen to in Fires in the Mirror. The anonymous Lubavitcher woman in the second scene of the play is a mother and preschool teacher in her mid-thirties. Wigs – Rivkah Siegal discusses the difficulty behind the custom of wearing wigs.
Fires in the Mirror contains twenty-nine different scenes, involving twenty-six different characters. Fires in the Mirror dramatizes those emotions, and tempers them, with an eloquent, dispassionate voice. Smith may even be suggesting that there is something deeply unknowable about history, which is why she refuses to take any objective stance on the situation in Crown Heights. 2, July 6, 1992, pp. Chords – Sonny Carson describes his personal contributions in the black community, and how he is trying to teach blacks to act against the white power structure.
A quote from the monologue of Robert Sherman reflects the nature of the tensions in the community, all of which are built on prejudice. Fires In The Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn And Other Identities Fires In The Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn And Other Identities. In George C. Wolfe's scene, for example, in which Mr. Wolfe becomes somewhat muddled, insisting that his blackness is independent from another person's whiteness, Smith suggests that a person's racial identity may depend on his/her relationship with other races as well as with the way that they view their own race. What is your subject's place in twentieth-century race relations? In the following essay, Schechner discusses Smith's technique in Fires in the Mirror and her overall performance art. A woman faces the camera, her voice nasal and New York. In his other scene, "Rain, " he describes and defends his role in the events following Gavin Cato's death, which he calls a "complete outrage. Norman Rosenbaum shouts at Yankel Rosenbaum's funeral, "My brother's blood cries out to you from the ground. " Her way of working is less like that of a conventional Euro-American actor and more like that of African, Native American, and Asian ritualists. It's one of the consolations of first-rate art that there is always hope in being able to see with newly unobstructed eyes. The Coup – Roslyn Malamud blames the police and black leaders for letting the events and crisis get out of control.
'You better warm up the ovens again' from blacks? Discussing how Jews came to be scapegoats for the discrimination and oppression directed against blacks, Pogrebin points out that "Only Jews listen, / only Jews take Blacks seriously, / only Jews view Blacks as full human beings that you / should address / in their rage. " Smith is able to penetrate the nature and meaning of this conflict so provocatively, however, only by exploring the key broader issues at its roots, particularly how people develop and understand their religious, ethnic, cultural, sexual, and class identities. Then, in a one-woman show, Smith actually embodies the people she has interviewed: dressing like them, using their words, and moving using their gestures.
At Gavin Cato's funeral in 1991, Sharpton spoke out against racism by Hasidic Jews and helped to mobilize large protests in Crown Heights. Wearing a black fedora, black jacket, and reading glasses, he is interviewed in his home. Davis is the activist and intellectual whose scene "Rope" discusses the need for a new way of viewing race relations. Her play, which is the thirteenth part of her unique project On the Road: A Search for the American Character combines journalism and drama in order to examine not just the racial tension and violence in Crown Heights, but much broader themes, including racial, religious, gender, and class identity, and the historical conflict between these communities in the United States. While he was trying to stop blacks from instigating violence, he was hit and handcuffed by the police and, after he was released, threatened by a young black man. Her performances have not always included all twenty-nine, and the order of characters has varied. This year's award went to Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa—perhaps Tony voters thought it was a play about a hoofer. ) Reuven Ostrov describes how Jews get scared because there are Jew haters everywhere. When Smith performs her play, she acts in the role of each interviewee, embodying his/her voice and movements, and expressing his/her message and personality. She has since written and performed four additional plays, including Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1993), which won an Obie Award and was nominated for a Tony Award. By recognizing only shows produced within a fourteen block area, the Tonys manage to exclude from consideration (except for a single award to a resident theater—this year the Goodman) about 99 percent of the nation's theatrical activity.
After enjoying marked success in his private education, Jeffries worked and studied in Europe and Africa and then took a position as professor of African American studies at the City University of New York. Jeffries claims to have been tired when he made his infamous anti-Semitic speech in Albany, yet displays his usual paranoia in charging Arthur Schlesinger Jr. with suggesting that "this is the one to kill" just because the historian devoted a full page to him in The Disuniting of America. In "Me and James's Thing, " the Reverend Al Sharpton explains that he straightens his hair (a practice that developed in the 1950s to simulate "white" hair) because he once promised the soul music star James Brown that he would always wear it this way. Birthed from a series of interviews with over fifty members of the Jewish and Black communities, the Drama Desk award-winning work translated their voices verbatim, and in the process revolutionized the genre of documentary theatre. A physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aaron Bernstein is a man in his fifties who wears a shirt with a pen guard. Meeting people face-to-face made it possible for Smith to move like them, sound like them, and allow what they were to enter her own body. Isaac – Pogrebin talks about her uncle Isaac, a Holocaust survivor, who was forced by the Nazis to load his wife and children onto a train headed for the gas chambers. Green is the director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective and the codirector of a black-Hasidic basketball team that developed after the riots.
Please note, this production contains the use of herbal cigarettes. The events of August 1991 revealed that Crown Heights was possessed: by anger, racism, fear, and much misunderstanding. A sharp-tongued Brooklyn yenta attired in a spangled woolen sweater asks, "This famous Reverend Al Sharpton, which I'd like to know, who ordained him? " Robert Brustein, for example, writes in his New Republic article "Awards vs.
In its first scene "The Desert, " Ntozake Shange discusses identity in terms of feeling a part of, yet separate from, one's surroundings. In the next scene, "16 Hours Difference, " Rosenbaum describes his reaction at the time he heard about his brother's murder. He breaks off, pauses, and becomes muddled when he tries to state that he is "not—going—to place myself / (Pause. ) The deaths of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenabum stirred up hatreds. She captures the essence of the characters she interviews, distilling their thoughts into a brief scene that provides a separate and coherent perspective on a particular situation or idea. …] I don't love my neighbors, I don't know my black neighbors. " Richard Schechner, however, was among those who discussed Smith's stylistic prowess as a writer and performer. Fri, April 16 @ 7:30pm. A rapper from Los Angeles, Mo is a skilled poet and a socially conscious political thinker. Four nights of serious rioting followed.
Implicitly defending the young black people who used phrases like "Heil Hitler" in the riots, he argues that they do not even know who Hitler was, and that the only black leader they know is Malcolm X. He "smiles frequently, " and he is "upbeat, impassioned… Full. Smith learned about interviewing and embodying people by experimenting with various... Roots – Leonard Jeffries describes his involvement in Roots, a television series about African-American family histories and the slave trade. By displaying the many sides of the issue, she delves into the root causes of the situation in Crown Heights and she attempts to communicate what really occurred. This quote illustrates the ties the two communities have.
She focuses on how she feels like she is not herself and that she is fake. The next section, "Hair, " begins with a scene in which an anonymous black girl talks about how Hispanic and black teenagers in her Crown Heights junior high school think about race and act according to their racial identities. How does that affect the audience's perception of the topic? Nation of Islam Minister Conrad Muhammed (Smith in a red bow tie) affirms that the Jewish Holocaust was nothing compared with 200 million people killed on slave ships over a 300-year period. Most characters have one monologue; the Reverend Al Sharpton, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Norman Rosenbaum have two monologues each. Here, a black actress (Chrystal Bates) and a white actress (Jennifer Mendenhall) constitute the cast, under the direction of Sara Chazen and Marc Masterson. In 1991, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, a member of the Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism lost control of his car, jumped the curb, and killed a seven-year-old black child. Richard Green then speaks of the rage of black youths in Crown Heights and the lack of role models for black youths. Even as a fine painter looks with a penetrating vision, so Smith looks and listens with uncanny empathy.
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