Long, Hot Summers

A play at the JCC and a question about books for beachcombers, films for fireflies

Creatures, who are you?

Who Told You That You Were Naked?

Theater J, at DC’s Jewish Community Center, is currently running a production of Anna Deavere Smith’s 1992 Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities. In August 1991 a car in the entourage of the leader of the Chabad/Lubavitch Hasidim struck two black children and killed one. In the following days, a Lubavitcher student was murdered, presumably in revenge. Rioting broke out in Crown Heights, the center of Lubavitch life and also, at the time, the home of large American-born and Caribbean black communities. Smith created this one-woman show based on interviews with people from, or relating in some way to, the communities involved in the Crown Heights riots. She played all the roles, flowing in an instant from Al Sharpton to a Hasidic mother to a corner boy to a Jewish scholar.

The form of the play embodies certain claims about identity, though those claims conflict: identity is a costume, identity is what defines our character, we can inhabit one another’s experience, we can never fully understand even our own words (let alone others’). There is a certain “we are all members of one body” imagery inherent in the act of portraying all these people. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Smith’s follow-up, a similar performance based on interviews about a different riot, is a little more explicit about the need to inhabit another person’s perspective by truly seeing and hearing them. It’s also longer, iirc, and feels more fleshed-out; Fires in the Mirror is a first project and can feel a little schematic.

At Theater J the roles are played by January LaVoy, who also co-directs. She’s great—and physically reminiscent of Deavere Smith, which I do think matters in a play about what we “read” from other people’s bodies. I don’t have a lot to say here beyond, “If you want to watch this play, it’s good,” but here are a few other scattered notes.

# People accept the identities given them. Is it being put in a box, or being offered a home?

# Of course that, like the things I’ll say below, is a conclusion drawn from the excerpts Smith herself chose. She’s creating the version of these people we’ll know. Maybe this pointillist garden was always just a smudgy collection of colored dots!

# Structural evils and world-shaping horrors emerge as individual sins, mostly wrath and pride. You can take this in a therapeutic direction and talk about “generational trauma” but the microcosm is also the idea behind the care of souls.

# A surprising amount of this play revolves around the idea of being special. Who gets to be special? Are the Jews the special ones, or is it really Black people? (A lot of this play is people saying things that sound very reasonable until they suddenly swerve into defensive pride and/or hatred.) I think this theme exposes the ways in which this is a conflict about degradation. People afraid of degradation respond by proclaiming their specialness. There’s a John Braithwaite thing in here, about humiliation as the impetus to violence and other forms of harm. Braithwaite offers the possibility of humiliation that cleanses and restores; that’s not an option anybody takes here.

# Keep your eye out for the times when people discuss institutional failure: police, hospitals. Why are those critiques so glancing?

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At the Drive-In, With the Fireflies

I asked if anybody wanted themed lists from me, and the only person who took me up on this suggested books or films with the atmosphere, summer. I love this, and as I thought about it I realized that summer movies, maybe even more than autumn ones, are often about something ending. The summer is a caesura, a memory, “let’s sit down a moment before we go.” Summer Hours, Stand By Me, Summer of ’85; The Leopard, Us, Summer of Sam. There are exceptions: Killer of Sheep, Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn (ok so Spike Lee is definitely emerging here as the man with the summertime muse). Those are movies about the ongoing, even Crooklyn which is about the texture of childhood.

For books, tbh the only one I can think of is Tove Jansson’s perfect jumble of seashells, The Summer Book:

All the events are small. Sophia has a friend over to the island and then gets fed up with her. A cat is unsatisfying. Sophia invests a bathrobe with an enormous weight of frightening fantasy. Sophia and her grandmother break in to a new neighbor’s house, then run away from him, then share a drink with him, then let him alone. …

All summers draw inevitably toward their end. And this is the recurring theme of The Summer Book, the different perspectives Sophia and her grandmother have on death from their two ends of life.

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I have A Month in the Country in my to-read pile. You people should add your summer-suffused books in the comments!

Candle flame in infinitely-reflecting mirrors via Wikimedia Commons.