Screen Picks

Twilight: Los Angeles

(Mon., April 30, 9 p.m., WHYY-TV 12)

Directed by Slam’s Marc Levin (who’ll be in town next week for the PFWC screening of his Brooklyn Babylon), this adaptation of Anna Deavere Smith’s powerful theater piece comes to PBS nearly 10 years to the day after the L.A. riots began. Smith’s stage method is something like theatrical journalism, collecting interviews from hundreds of participants, victims and bystanders and assembling them in a collage in which she plays all the parts. Her acting isn’t anything as callow as impersonation — it’s more like possession. Sometimes, as when embodying a bereaved Korean widow or an obnoxious Hollywood type who discusses how difficult the riots made it to find a decent place to eat, Smith’s voice assumes a perfect simulation, but just as often, she seems to seek out rhythm more than tone, capturing every stutter, every interruption, every unfinished thought, as if the true answers lay between people’s words, not in them. Levin adds a few documentary touches, including footage from 1992 and from 1999, when Smith went back to L.A. to do further interviews, for the camera this time. But the substance of Twilight is Smith’s astonishing performance, which exposes both rifts and connections. Levin takes advantage of the format to shift settings (usually simply sketched) and allow Smith to slip into different costumes. But the most powerful moments come when the transitions play out in real time, as when she shifts from Daryl Gates into an outraged black activist into a Korean widow and back again. (The footage of real figures such as Gates and Maxine Waters is a little confusing juxtaposed with Smith’s performances of them, but it’s probably the right decision to include it, given how abstract the film might seem with no real context.) Smith’s presentation crucifies as many figures as it pardons, but in the end, Twilight is a profoundly hopeful work, one that despite the depth of the wounds which led to (and were salted by) the riots, provides hope that they could be healed. If all those people can fit inside one woman, they can fit in one world as well.

Anna Deavere Smith will perform excerpts from her newest work, Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change, Fri. Apr. 27, 8 p.m., at Marshall Auditorium, Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Ave., Haverford, PA, 610-896-1333.