The Mirror And The Light Pdf
She focuses on how she feels like she is not herself and that she is fake. Smith examines many of the historical causes of the situation, many of the racial theories that help to explain it, and a broad variety of opinions on the events and people involved, in order to come closer to the truth about what happened and why. Crown Heights, Brooklyn, August 1991. Perhaps the Tonys have gotten too predictable for sustained indignation. What is your subject's place in twentieth-century race relations? FIRES IN THE MIRROR. Tensions between Jews and blacks in the Crown Heights neighborhood had been running high because of the perception among Lubavitchers that there was a great deal of black anti-Semitism, and because of the perception among blacks that there was a great deal of white racism and that Lubavitchers enjoyed preferential treatment from the police.
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And Carmel Cato, an exhausted Caribbean, tells of how the death of his child was "like an atomic bomb. " Sharpton grew up in Brooklyn and was ordained as a Pentecostal minister in 1963. Commenting that "Jews come second to the police / when it comes to feelings of dislike among Black folks, " he cites his close connection to the youth of Crown Heights and his ability to mobilize them into activism that will last all summer. Identity is a definitive issue in Fires in the Mirror; it preoccupies characters, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, "Big Mo" Matthews, Rivkah Siegal, and several of the anonymous black and Lubavitcher men and women. Smith is a versatile journalist, playwright, and performer who is able to excel at all three roles and gain a close connection to her material. A car traveling in the cavalcade of Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, driven by Yosef Lifsh, ran a red light, went out of control, and hit the two children. That evening, a group of young black men stabbed and killed a Hasidic scholar from Australia named Yankel Rosenbaum. She claims that her black neighbors want exactly what she wants out of life, although she admits that she does not know them. The play is a series of monologues based on interviews conducted by Smith with people involved in the Crown Heights crisis, both directly and as observers and commentators. In the opening scene of the play, she considers what "identity" is and how people are different from their surroundings. Physicists make telescopes with mirrors as large as possible in order to minimize the "circle of confusion. Throughout Fires in the Mirror, Smith considers how people construct their notions of selfhood, particularly how they see themselves in relation to their community and race. In "Bad Boy, " an anonymous young man contends that the sixteen-year-old blamed for Yankel Rosenbaum's murder is an athlete and therefore would not have killed anyone. In "Knew How to Use Certain Words, " Henry Rice explains his role in the events.
Monique "Big Mo" Matthews. On the suspended brick facades are white paint patches smudged in muddy colors. He stresses that leaders of the black community, such as Al Sharpton, do not control the youths actually carrying out the riots, and that the youths' rage builds up and cannot be contained. In the following review-essay, Brustein describes the varied characters Smith develops and portrays around the Crown Heights riots in Fires in the Mirror, praising Smith's collection of "all these tensions into an overpowering conclusion. I want to investigate how Smith does what she does in Fires in the Mirror. "The viscerally smart, endlessly empathetic Michael Benjamin Washington makes the work sing, and the voices of its real people sound eerily vivid.
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Fires in the Mirror is part of a series to be called On the Road: A Search for American Character. On the contrary, his scene seems to imply that racial identity is locked into a sense of self that is very much dependent on what self is not, or on what self perceives as the other or opposite of oneself. Each scene is titled with the person's name and a key phrase from that interview. She wrote the play after the Crown Heights neighborhood erupted in three days of violent race riots in August, 1991. Rabbi Spielman's one-sided explanation of the accident and the events that followed reveal that he is unable or unwilling to view the situation from the perspective of members of the black community. The two people—plus many others: men and women, professors and street people, blacks, Jews, rabbis, reverends, lawyers, and politicians—are enacted by Anna Deavere Smith, an African American performer of immense abilities.
Her play acknowledges the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of ever ascertaining exactly what is at the root of it all, implying that history is not objective, but that all people, including historians, form their understandings of past events based on their racial attitudes, emotions, and attachments. During the introduction of the play, Smith states, "in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences", which meant that despite the Jewish and black community being in one place seemingly together, they were divided in their perceptions and actions towards each other. Lousy Language – Robert Sherman explains that words like "bias" and "discrimination" are not specific enough, leading to poor communication. Glenn Close, functioning as hostess for the event, even felt obliged to remind the glittering Minskoff audience that "many of the most famous musicals came from plays. " One aspect of this play that was admirable was the amount of and types of messages being sent. The title suggests her ambition to bring to the stage a wide spectrum of contemporary types, both celebrated and obscure. The Lubavitcher community filed a lawsuit against Dinkins and his administration, criticizing their mishandling of the riots, and Dinkins's unpopularity among Jews was a major factor in his loss to Rudolph Giuliani in the 1993 mayoral elections. Sat, April 24 @ 7:30pm (live and live streamed). 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.
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In the next scene, "16 Hours Difference, " Rosenbaum describes his reaction at the time he heard about his brother's murder. He died of stab wounds. In relationship to your whiteness, " and when he attempts to establish the self-sufficiency of his blackness: "My blackness does not resis—ex—re—/ exist in relationship to your whiteness. She includes perspectives on black history and Jewish history, particularly slavery and the Holocaust, and she explores different perceptions of black and Jewish relations with the police, the government, and the white majority in the United States. Minister Conrad Mohammed then outlines his view of the terrible historical suffering by blacks at the hands of whites, stressing that blacks, and not Jews, are God's chosen people. Achievements, " in New Republic, Vol. This section contains 299 words. Schechner, Richard, "Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation, " in TDR: The Drama Review, Vol.
Rage – Richard Green says that there are no role models for black youths, leading to rage among them. Signature is excited to work with Anna Deavere Smith to reimagine this play for new performers and collaborators. She "incorporates" them. Lemrick Nelson, Jr. was acquitted of second-degree murder charges; Yosef Lifsh was not indicted for the death of Gavin Cato.