Long Wharf Holds Up A Mirror

As she moves from one side of the stage of Long Wharf to the other, actor Cloteal L. Horne transforms herself 25 times, from Jewish preschool teacher to Black playwright, from a girl in middle school to a minister in the Nation of Islam, from a rabbi to a Guiyanese immigrant. It’s a feat of performance in the service of a now-classic play — Fires in the Mirror, running at Long Wharf now through Feb. 6 — that tries to get at the deeper truths in an incident of racial violence that happened 30 years ago, the roots of which lay in centuries of prejudice, and the specter of which still hangs over us today.

The play’s focus is the 1991 riot in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, precipitated when a car that was part of a motorcade for a prominent Hasidic rabbi ran a yellow or red light (we’ll never know for sure), veered onto the sidewalk, and struck two children — Guyanese immigrants — killing one and severely injuring the other. Black youth responded by attacking several Jews on the street, killing one. Three days of looting, of stores and Jewish homes, followed. The riot became a scar on the neighborhood, the demographic makeup of which today isn’t so different than it was in 1991.

The script of Fires in the Mirror is taken from interviews playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith conducted with over 100 people within the year after the riots happened; she edited them down into a one-woman show that premiered in 1992. The play’s script means that a single actor has to portray 26 people, ranging from neighborhood Black and Jewish residents who remain anonymous, to clergymen and public officials, to public figures like Angela Davis and Al Sharpton, who was a divisive figure in the protests that occurred on the third day of rioting. In the play’s original run, Smith herself performed the show, which she eventually filmed for PBS and posterity. She memorized her interview subjects’ words verbatim and attempted further to capture their intonations, rhythms, and accents as accurately as possible in her performance.

Fires in the Mirror comes to Long Wharf having originated at Baltimore Center Stage, where it had a month-long run late last year. It thus isn’t surprising that Cloteal L. Horne hits the stage running, shifting easily from character to character, embodying Black people and Jews, women and men, young and old, with equal aplomb. A few well-chosen costume pieces (by Mika Eubanks) — glasses, hats, jackets — help, as does the stage design (by Diggle), a sandy circle within a larger sandy square that emulates both a place for meditation and a ring for combat. Music cues (Bailey Trierweiler, Daniela Hart, and Noel Nichols) and projections (by Camilla Tassi), sometimes of the actual people, nimbly close the seams in the transitions. Director Nicole Brewer keeps the play rolling while allowing each speaker just enough breathing room to let what they have to say sink in. But in the end it all rests on Horne’s shoulders, and her modulations in voice and changes in body language and expression — some subtle, some quite dramatic — are at this point so lived in and well-thought out that by the end of the play, they barely draw attention to themselves at all.

Thirty years after the Crown Heights riots and the first staging of the play, the form and themes of Fires in the Mirror hit differently. In our current artistic climate, It’s interesting to wonder if such a show could get produced today if it weren’t already something of a modern classic. Would someone during the play’s development have insisted, for instance, that Jewish actors represent the Jews in the play? What would be gained — and what might be lost — in changing the play from a one-woman show to an ensemble cast? (What is lost if our current up and coming playwrights have fewer modes of expression available to them, and can’t do what Fires in the Mirror did?)

T. Charles Erickson Photo

More generally, at a time when much of our political discourse is framed by strongly asserted identities, Fires in the Mirror has a subtle message to impart that complicates those assertions. It examines the fragility, slipperiness, and changeability of identity as an idea. It is in some ways a play about the dangers of identity, the ways people weaponize it against others and use it, sometimes, to cut themselves off from others’ and their own humanity. It’s not arguing against asserting one’s identity at all — embracing and diving into one’s identity, finding meaning in one’s personal, familial, and cultural history, of course, can be a source of great strength and abiding comfort. But it is arguing for all of us to examine and understand, in a deeper way than is common in our current discourse, what it means when we identify as one thing or another, and when we identify others.

If you don’t know your people’s history, don’t know how the identity you claim, or the one that is forced upon you, has changed over time and from place to place, Fires shows that in some key sense you don’t know who you are. But Fires also shows the danger in identifying with something too strongly, too rigidly, and labeling other people too strongly and rigidly. As each of the speakers gets to have their say, part of what emerges from the play is that the violence in Crown Heights persisted as it did in part because people on all sides of the riot used identities to dehumanize one another. That dehumanization writ on a much grander scale, the play points out, allowed oppressors to see the oppressed as less than people, and enabled the horrors of the slave trade and the Holocaust, which cast their terrible shadows over the riots in 1991 and continue to shape us all today.

Fires in the Mirror shows that even facts are more slippery than we want them to be. We don’t necessarily know what we think we know. Everyone’s motivations, from the people in the motorcade to the rioters to the community leaders and public officials who have to deal with the aftermath, are more complicated than they first appear. Even more deeply, as a few speakers point out, the more painful the subject, the more language itself tends to fail. We don’t have words to fully encompass the damage inflicted on Black people by slavery, or on Jews by the Holocaust, and when those tensions explode, we don’t have words that can magically repair them, either. We can never really say how we feel, and the consequences of miscommunication can be tragic.

Maybe that’s why art forms, like literature, music, visual arts, and, well, plays, can be so important. They can’t change the past or fix the present, but they can help us see both more clearly, and with greater compassion. Fires in the Mirror offers clarity by allowing us to see each of the people portrayed more fully as human beings, with their individual experiences, insights, flaws, and even from time to time senses of humor. And it shows that for all the fragility of identity, the contested nature of history, or the maddening haziness of facts, some experiences stand as hard truths that are also doorways to empathy. There’s the collective grief of a group of people struggling to emerge from past trauma. But there’s also the singular shock of a brother losing his brother, and, with the play’s final speaker, the devastating sadness of a father losing a son, far too soon. Maybe in sitting with the raw pain of another human being, somewhere at the bottom of that moment, there’s a little wisdom to be gained.

Fires in the Mirror runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through Feb. 6. Visit the theater’s website for tickets, show dates and times, and more information.

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