Fires in the Mirror
| Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Anna Deavere Smith |
| Date premiered | May 1, 1992 |
| Place premiered |
The Public Theater New York City |
| Original language | English |
| Series | On the Road: A Search for the American Character |
| Setting | Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City |
Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities is a one-person play by American playwright, author, actress, and professor Anna Deavere Smith. It chronicles the viewpoints of people from two different communities, Black and Jewish, connected directly and indirectly to the Crown Heights riot which occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August 1991.
Fires in the Mirror is composed of monologues taken directly from transcripts of interviews that Smith conducted with all the people depicted in the play. It is considered a pioneering example of the genre known as verbatim theatre.
Anna Deavere Smith's play Fires in the Mirror is a part of her project On the Road: A Search for the American Character. It is a series of monologues excerpted from interviews. Fires in the Mirror chronicles a civic disturbance in the New York neighborhood of Crown Heights in August 1991. In that racially divided neighborhood, a car driven by a Jewish man veered onto a sidewalk and killed a 7-year-old Caribbean-American boy who was learning to ride a bicycle. The accident and the delayed response of emergency medical personnel sparked protests during which a Jewish student visiting from Australia was stabbed on the street by a group of black youths. Days of rioting ensued, exposing to national scrutiny the depth of the racial divisions in Crown Heights. The rioting produced 190 injuries, 129 arrests, and an estimated one million dollars in property damage.
Smith interviewed leading politicians, writers, musicians, religious leaders, and intellectuals together with residents of Crown Heights and participants in the disturbances to craft the monologues of her play. Through the words of 26 different people, in 29 monologues, Smith explores how and why people signal their identities, how they perceive and respond to people different from themselves, and how barriers between groups can be breached. "My sense is that American character lives not in one place or the other," Smith writes in her introduction to the play, "but in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences." The title of the play suggests a vision of art as a site of reflection where the passions and fires of a specific moment can be examined from a new angle, contemplated, and better understood.
The characters are as follows:
Ntozake Shange: 42- to 45-year-old African-American playwright, poet, novelist.
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