“I’m trying to tell the story from various points of view and to find things the media didn’t,” says Smith with excessive modesty. With her vivid face, laser-beam eyes, strong, supple voice, a few props and swift changes in dress, Smith leaps into each character. Using verbatim dialogue from her own interviews, Smith “embodies,” in her word, Hasidic rabbis, black ministers, Jewish housewives, street kids, a woman rapper. A leather-jacketed Smith nails the brainy glamour of black radical Angela Davis, who calls for new ways of coming together or else “we will be caught up in this cycle of genocidal violence.”
Smith captures the tragic absurdity of that cycle. The accident that killed Gavin Cato becomes a Brooklyn “Rashomon” as it’s described from the angles of Jews and blacks. A black youth attacks the police for protecting the Jewish driver. Inventing a startling conspiracy theory, he points out that the Israeli flag and a police car both have the same colors-blue and white. Rabbi Joseph Spielman says that a Jewish passenger was calling the police on a car phone when a black youth stole the phone from his hand. Rosenbaum’s brother Norman cries out: “My brother was killed … for no other reason than he was a Jew!” Black activist Sonny Carson says: “I’m not going to advocate any coming together and healing of America and all that shit. No way!”
Smith even finds humor in the collision of exotically different cultures. Gittell Lazerson tells how her baby flipped on the radio during the Sabbath, when Orthodox Jews can’t turn on appliances. She had to go find a black kid to turn it off: “He probably thought, ‘And people say Jewish people are really smart, and they don’t know how to turn off their radios’.” Such homely details contrast with the anger of Nation of Islam Minister Conrad Muhammad, who compares five years of the Holocaust with 300 years of black slavery.
As these voices collide, you can’t help wondering where Smith herself stands in the kind of conflict she’s dramatizing.
“I’m not Afrocentric in a typical way,” she says. “An Afrocentric person would never do this piece. My voice is in the juxtaposition of other voices. It’s in the choices that I make.” Her fierce honesty in those choices almost convinces you that there’s still objective truth in a violently polarized time. The oldest of five children in a Baltimore family, Smith went to Beaver College, a small women’s school (now coed) near Philadelphia. Her interest in language led her to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. In 1976 she came to New York where she “pounded the pavement,” getting small parts in soap operas. She taught at NYU, Yale and Carnegie Mellon, where she began her interview technique: “I wanted to show students that human speech is not neat. I agree with Pinter: speech is a strategy to cover nakedness.”
“Fires in the Mirror” is part of a series of one-woman shows she has done called “On the Road: A Search for American Character.” She worked with director Christopher Ashley, but the final decisions are hers. “I’m not an impersonator. I don’t have a photographic memory. I don’t have a genius ear, like people who remember everything they hear. I work through voice rhythms, the impact of the words on my body.” Smith is an ideal theater artist for the ’90s, as America attempts to synthesize an increasingly diverse culture. “My whole project is about the acceptance of others,” she says. Unflinchingly, she shows how difficult and necessary that acceptance is.
