Listening to Los Angeles in the Theatre of Anna Deavere Smith and Gabriel Kahane

Postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, David Harvey, and Frederic Jameson have tended to approach cities through the eye rather than the ear, often citing Los Angeles as a prototypical example of an urban simulacrum. This article takes up two works of theatre that focus on listening to rather than looking at Los Angeles. Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Gabriel Kahane’s The Ambassador (2014) use voice and music, respectively, to sound out neglected histories and experiences overlooked by theorists who apprehend Los Angeles primarily through vision. Through the close reading of dramatic texts, musical scores, and live and recorded performances of these two works, this article troubles the pervasive ocularcentrism in critical interpretations of Los Angeles, using theatre to theorize a more inclusive dramaturgy and geography of the city.

Monologic ethics: The single speaker as discursive partner in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

This reflective article asserts that the monologue form helps audiences and readers ask ethical questions concerning the relationship(s) between subjectivity and communal identity formation. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, researched, written and originally performed by Anna Deavere Smith, serves as this article’s primary textual example of a monologic play. The play’s monologic form embodies ethical possibility through its attentiveness to multiple perspectives and intersubjective dialogue developed from Smith’s interviews following the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. Because the violence against Rodney King (like the more recent murder of George Floyd) was recorded on video, the play’s monologic ethics also engage with, and sometimes against, technological evidence of institutional racism. Monologues, and especially soliloquies, function within larger dialogic plays as a mirror – a reflection of consciousness. These minor generic variations in dialogic plays here become Twilight’s primary organizing principle, thus transgressing traditional genre laws. Earlier twentieth-century monologic texts, by Beckett and others, resignified and problematized the soliloquy’s relationship to identity-formation. The paradigm of an isolated single subjectivity, such as Hamlet or even King Lear’s Edmund, is sedimented into classical form. Smith’s play, Twilight, like Shange’s monologic text, For Colored Girls, without one central protagonist, restructures and reframes the dramatic monologue to allow a closer look at the ethics of how we live with our own fragmented selves.

There’s a lot of work to do to turn this thing around: An Interview with Anna Deavere Smith

For decades, Anna Deavere Smith has been a pioneer in solo performance art, engaging contemporary issues and social justice. Notes from the Field, the centerpiece of Smith’s latest endeavor, The Pipeline Project, explores the school-to-prison pipeline.