On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TWILIGHT TRAGEDIES BY STEFAN KANFER I AM NOT the only one put off by Medea; Aristotle felt aspects of Euripides' bitter tragedy were "revolting." So I am in good company. Then again, so...
...When the 15-year-old became abusive the shopkeeper shot and killed her...
...Net result: 58 deaths, thousands of injuries, and $1 billion worth of property damage...
...No wonder whites and Koreans were so terrorized by the uprising: It threatened a system viciously tilted in their favor...
...In a matter of days he plans to take a younger and more prestigious bride, the princess Glauce...
...The same holds true for the Chorus...
...in part, because it is one of the great showpieces for an over-the-top actress...
...Gang members, policemen, journalists, merchants, jurors, students, a bookkeeper, a talent agent, a musician all pass in review...
...Their action was only the convex mirror image of violence done to them on streets and in courtrooms...
...Alternately as crisp and witty as an Evelyn Waugh hostess, or as malevolent as a black widow spider, she rarely raises her voice until the blood-soaked ending...
...All the while, whites continued to live in Bel Air, Beverly Hills and the other plush enclaves of West Los Angeles...
...Much has been made of Smith's ear for accents and intonations, and she is indeed expert at rendering white speech and black colloquialisms...
...As the world knows, on April 29, 1992, despite the evidence of the tape, a jury in Simi Valley acquitted the officers...
...The Messenger bearing news of the offstage atrocities (Dan Mullane) is equally memorable...
...The terse, halting recollections of Koreans are less successful...
...It found that the deterioration of family values does lead to child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a litany of other social catastrophes...
...There is no denying Smith's mimetic gifts, or the shrewdness of her director, George C. Wolfe, who keeps the evening alive with fluent changes of voice and presentation...
...Rigg's nuanced performance is wiser than her predecessors...
...Unseen by the cops, he videotaped the beating...
...For the last two years, columnists, sociologists, activists, and artists have attempted to make sense of this destructive fury...
...From their testimonies she culled the monologues of some 50 blacks, whites, Latinos, and Orientals...
...Although Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is the latest and the most inventive of these efforts, it falls far short...
...For one thing, the material is too unwieldy to be fully represented on the stage...
...Medea is a big thing that breaks through all mere prudences...
...but in the age-old phrase, let's try to be friends...
...Aware of Medea's barbarous history, King Creon (John Turner) orders her into exile: "I am afraid of you...
...News of the verdict ignited a 72-hour Walpurgisnacht...
...the state was satisfied with five years' probation and a $500 fine...
...Soon Ja Du never spent a day in jail...
...Supporting her is a superlative cast, a smashing set, a colloquial translation, and an inspired director...
...Members of minority groups were regularly stopped and searched by patrolmen even if they had committed no crime...
...On the evening of March 3, 1991, a group of Los Angeles police chased down a speeding car...
...He warned a producer that the star "mustn't blither...
...Yet deriding the speaker does not diminish the subject...
...Just as Paul Brown's costumes eschew the customary Grecian robes for a rough-hewn modernity, so Peter J. Davison discards the easy references to ancient Greece: columns, friezes, statuary, etc...
...When Medea reminds Jason of past favors, for example, she grumbles, "And now you drop me...
...riot on a lack of 'family values.'" I have no happy memories of Quayle's tenure, or of his use of an inane sitcom to prove his point...
...Ask Saddam Hussein...
...Smith's bias is underlined by notes in the Playbill...
...The actress' strength derives from the sheer variety of personalities she evokes at the Cort Theater...
...Despite its longevity, Medea is little more than a revenge drama with insubstantial victims, a monstrous protagonist, and speeches that seem to have been chipped in capital letters on black marble...
...The wronged woman greets this news with an air of resignation...
...In their place he has constructed a wall of steel plates, covered with rust and rivets...
...However, the central flaw lies not in current events but in an illiberal agenda concealed by a mask of objectivity...
...Jason, surprised and relieved, welcomes this conciliatory gesture...
...It is worth noting that a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Dan Quayle Was Right," became one of the most widely quoted pieces in the magazine's history...
...Also looking on was an amateur photographer named George Holliday...
...His acceptance turns out to be a death warrant for Glauce and Creon: The gifts are saturated with poison...
...George Bernard Shaw used to despair of finding the correct production of Medea—and the right actress to play the title role...
...That area seems off-limits in Twilight...
...In a 1991 case, a Korean-American shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, accused an African-American girl, Latasha Harlins, of shoplifting...
...They supply everything but clarity to this aptly named show...
...No wonder the region was so combustible...
...Twilight, after all, is the period when lines blur and illusions prevail...
...And few Americans would disagree that the results of the first trial were a travesty of justice...
...There is one more impressive character in this production: the set...
...Hence the celebrated productions starring Judith Anderson and, more recently, Zoe Caldwell...
...Thatracism infected the Oriental community...
...Certainly Los Angeles had an abundance of uniformed thugs...
...Some of this thesis holds true...
...A chronology of what she calls the "Uprising/Insurrection/Riot/ Rebellion" runs from police brutalities in 1988 to the 1993 trial of four young blacks who nearly killed Reginald Denny...
...As she did in her previous work, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, the playwright/ actress interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses and residents of the destroyed community...
...She asks only for a small delay, in order to let her little boys deliver a robe and crown to the royal house...
...Even so, virtually every member of a minority group is given a shred of dignity, a credible plea of despair...
...The men surrounding Medea are usually upstaged by the powerhouse lead...
...more than once I saw black and Latino drivers stopped merely for driving in neighborhoods where they seemed out of place...
...Smith never exculpates the most violent looters, who delightedly recall the days of destruction as a rite of passage...
...Prior to 1992, according to Smith, the Los Angeles justice system was based on oppression...
...Then again, so is Diana Rigg in the production at the Long-acre Theater...
...The Rodney King affair had begun...
...Not here...
...no need to wrap the face in phrases...
...Atthatmoment, everything is at hand: excitement, terror, pleasure, grief—everything, that is, except truth...
...there must be no holes in her...
...When the driver resisted their commands, several officers knocked him to the ground and bludgeoned him 56 times with a baton as the others looked on...
...His work is enormously aided by Toni-Leslie James' quick-change costumes and by the vibrant lighting of Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer...
...In the final scene, when Medea changes her flowing red dress for a white one stained with her children's lifeblood, those plates are jerked loose from their moorings and clang against each other with a huge, doom-laden sound recalling the wrath of Zeus...
...Gradually a shape emerges...
...For another, the Federal civil rights trial in which two officers were convicted, as well as the $3.8 million award to King, tend to vitiate the impact of her one-woman show...
...The play has neither subtlety, catharsis nor redemption...
...Otherwise, the text honors the playwright without making him a lifeless monument...
...No wonder, given the news from Simi Valley, the rioters responded as they did...
...Once Medea learns of her enemies' demise, she finishes the job by slaughtering her own sons and condemning Jason to a life of perpetual anguish...
...En route she notes derisively that on May 19, 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered his "Murphy Brown" speech "in which he blamed the L.A...
...Still, there is a large area between the ravings of the Klan (which invited the Simi Valley jurors to join its organization) and the rabidity of the Crips and the Bloods, two of L.A.'s most notorious gangs...
...He responds to her deeds with smug ingratitude...
...Rigg is that big thing, and GBS should be living at this hour...
...Yet all this would have been insignificant without the actress' enormous elegance and force...
...To bang them with a fist is to set up a rumble even moodier than Jonathan Dove's incidental music...
...And her impersonation of a former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party carries a trenchant warning against self-styled revolutionaries: "You want to go up against the U.S...
...Why has it survived for more than two millennia...
...The moment underlines Medea's malignity and lends new significance to the term Greek Revival...
...In part, because this is the most accessible of Euripides' works...
...The lines seem less suggestive of ancient Greece than of Neil Simon's Manhattan...
...Alistair Elliot's translation trips over an occasional anachronism...
...meantime, blacks and Latinos seethed in the slums of South Central and East L.A...
...The customary group of 15 has been pared down to three (Jane Loretta Lowe, Judith Paris, Nuala Willis), and over the course of an intermissionless hour and a half their contralto chants become as haunting as any Wagnerian choir...
...The declaration, "I am adept at all that is hidden," is quite enough to freeze the marrow...
...If the police saw a black driver and a white female passenger, they often pulled the car over, automatically assuming that the woman was being held against her will...
...Out of love for her husband, Jason (Tim Oliver Woodward), Medea has stolen the Golden Fleece from her father, murdered her brother, fled with Jason to Corinth and given him two sons...
...government...
...Guided by director Jonathan Kent, Jason and Creon are as individual as fingerprints...
...In contrast, whites are selectively shown as brutes (Police Chief Darryl Gates), fools (Elaine Young, a real estate agent who would rather yammer about silicone implants than social inequities) or insensitive naifs (Diane Van Iden, a Brentwood mother who seems to sympathize with the downtrodden—and then asks, "Why can't they be like Arthur Ashe...
...As for her impressions of notables like Senator Bill Bradley, battered truckdriver Reginald Denny and opera diva Jessye Norman, they all too frequently verge on animated cartoons...
Vol. 77 • May 1994 • No. 5
