Media Archive

As she set about revising “Twilight” for a cast of five…Smith was struck by how vividly the voices of the Los Angeles residents she interviewed all those years ago still leap off its pages. “Every single person certainly deserved their place in a drama,” she remarks.

A reflection on Twilight by Harvard Professor Ju Yon Kim, who chairs the college’s Theater, Dance & Media concentration.

Twilight’s prescience lies in its power to capture that past moment of social strife and conflict in Los Angeles while also conveying revelations about our current troubling era.

In the 30 years since Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 made its world premiere, Anna Deavere Smith’s landmark documentary performances have borne witness to communities in crisis across the US and internationally.

Much has happened in America since 1992. And much has not.

Julia Schachnik, A.R.T.’s Community Organizing Manager, explains how the nontraditional casting of women and women of color as the “Founding Fathers” impacts the storytelling.

Theater is inherently an art form about freedom. Its mission has always been to challenge us to reflect in novel ways on the state of the world — as a vehicle not just for the loudest voices, but also for society’s most contrarian, oppressed, marginalized…It is opening floodgates of opportunity, seeking to fill our imaginative reservoirs with the creativity of — as Adams declares — all Americans.

The cast is made up of immigrants, Native Americans, ancestors of the enslaved and oppressed, queer and trans bodies. They make the audience reckon with the question: Independence for whom? And what kind of nation would this be if they had been considered in the first place?