RODNEY KING’S BEATING at the hands of Los Angeles police officers in 1991, their subsequent trial and acquittal, and the days of violent unrest that followed came 15 years before Samuel Adedeji was born. But seated last month in a darkened Cambridge theater, the Boston teenager was suddenly transported into the middle of the tinderbox of fear, anger, and racial animus that the events unleashed.
“I was overwhelmed. I got so emotional,” Adedeji said after seeing a performance of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a reimagined version of playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith’s widely-acclaimed one-woman performance that explores some of the most difficult issues raised by those events. “I got more than I expected,” said Adedeji, an 11th grader at the Neighborhood House Charter School in Dorchester who had never seen a professional theater performance before.
While it’s often said that theater, like other arts, can broaden our horizons, Adedeji’s experience was all about broadening theater’s horizons.
He was one of several hundred Boston area high school students who saw the show at the American Repertory Theater at no cost thanks to a grant from The Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation. The grant also underwrote up to 1,500 tickets made available for $5 to anyone who said they would benefit from the subsidy.
The A.R.T., founded in 1980 and based at Harvard University, has long pushed theater boundaries with provocative productions that take on challenging issues. But it has also shown a commitment to pushing the conventional boundaries of who theater is for, with deliberate efforts to break down barriers of race and class that often have theaters filled with predominantly white, well-off audiences.
“Accessibility at the A.R.T. has long been top priority,” said Rebecca Curtiss, the theater company’s public relations director. The A.R.T. has long offered reduced-price tickets to students and had special arrangements with many of its shows to bring in audiences that wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. “This is taking our value of accessibility to a new level,” Curtiss said of the free and heavily-discounted ticket initiative that accompanied the five-week run of “Twilight.”
The A.R.T. declined to share final numbers on the ticket initiative, but Curtiss suggested that it was not immune to the overall challenge of the “post-lockdown recovery period in which audiences have been slow to return.”
Smith is known for her development of a powerful theatrical form – it’s been called everything from “docudrama” to “theater verbatim” and a form of journalism – that combines in-depth interviews with scores of people on a topic with her extraordinary acting talents. She zeroes in on some of the most conflict-ridden moments in recent US history that lay bare raw feelings on race and identity.
For “Twilight,” Smith carried out more than 300 interviews with people touched by the events of the Rodney King saga, turning hundreds of hours of transcripts into a one-woman show in which she weaves together scenes that draw verbatim from her interviews to portray more than a dozen people – ranging from Congresswoman Maxine Waters to LA police chief Daryl Gates, a Korean shopkeeper, and Twilight Bey, a one-time gang member and the play’s namesake.
It’s an approach she has brought to other topics as charged as Black-Jewish relations in Brooklyn and the school-to-prison pipeline. If audiences come away with more questions than answers, Smith feels that she’s done her job.
“There’s three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth,” she said in a telephone interview.
The original “Twilight” was performed by Smith on Broadway in 1994, earning her a Tony Award nomination. For the recent revival, Smith stepped off the stage and divided the many roles she played among a multi-racial five-member cast.
Smith, who is on the A.R.T.’s board of trustees, calls the theater her “favorite place to take my work” because of its commitment to expanding the reach of who sees its productions.
“They do a fantastic job of bringing people in who see something in the work that could connect with them,” she said. “Who’s in the audience, who comes, and how they can be affected and maybe do something is at the core of what I’ve been working on since the beginning in the 1980s. It’s the core of what my work is.”
The A.R.T. initiative with “Twilight” did more than just bring in high school students to see the show. Several performances were accompanied by discussions with the students that explored themes from the play, either before or after the show.
Before the next-to-last “Twilight” performance on a Friday night in late September, about 40 high school students gathered for a “guided discussion” of race issues led by three students taking part in a new A.R.T. program that exposes high school students to a wide range of activities involved in theater production. The students were seated in groups of five or six at round tables in a meeting room at the Harvard Graduate School of Education library across the street from the A.R.T.
“We want you to talk about what you’ve been through,” Mistchnache Prinston, a senior at Boston Latin Academy and part of the A.R.T.’s Youth Action Team, told the gathering. “We want you to be honest and to ask questions,” said Prinston. “This is a space where you can be vulnerable. We want you to be kind and listen to other people. And we also want you to understand that respectful disagreement is okay.”
Over the course of an hour, the students grappled with a set of provocative statements about race. Each topic was introduced by one of the student leaders from the Youth Action Team reading a “prompt” to the room. Among them: “I feel more comfortable with people of the same race as me;” “only white people can be racist;” and “I avoid thinking about racism and police brutality.”
The students each had a packet that included four color-coded slips of paper reading “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree.” After thinking about the statement that was read out loud, on the count of three, they held up in unison the color-coded slip that best reflected their feelings. The prompts elicited a multi-colored range of reactions. After each statement, the students spent 10 minutes discussing it with those at their table.
“There was a lot to say,” said Sarah Osman, an 11th grader at Boston Latin School who was among the students taking part in the pre-performance discussion, which was dubbed “The Appetizer.”
The prompts “sparked some good conversation, but they were kind of out of nowhere,” she said in an interview several days later. “But when I watched the play, it all clicked,” she said of the performance, in which the issues raised by each of the statements figured prominently.
“There wasn’t a right answer,” Brenna Nicely, the A.R.T.’s education and engagement director, said of the student discussion topics, channeling Smith’s approach of exploring difficult issues that often defy simple resolution. “Each individual’s perspective was valued.”
“Complexity is definitely the name of the game,” said Evan Tao, another Youth Action Team member, about the “Twilight” discussion. “You realize, maybe I don’t know as much as I thought I did. Nobody walks away clean,” said Tao, a senior at Boston Trinity Academy, a private Christian school.
Smith, who was awarded a McArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1996 and is currently a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has made a deliberate effort to have her work reach a broader audience than professional theater often draws. From 1998 to 2000 she was at Harvard, where she founded and ran a program called the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue. Over three summers, she led a six-week program that drew a cross-section of community members to watch workshop productions focused on important social issues and then engage in conversations about them.
“Theater’s not for everybody,” said Smith. “But I think that we also can’t underestimate what it means to turn somebody on to this – these forms of art that they might not be thinking of.”
For Vivian Popa, a classmate of Osman’s at Boston Latin School, hearing the words of people who were directly touched by the Rodney King beating and all that followed offered a different window into the issues that underpinned the events.
“I’ve studied racism through school,” she said. “I’ve never had this kind of eye-opener before, getting to hear what actual people said, to hear their words.”
Smith said she was thrilled that a diverse population of young people had a chance to see a show that grapples with issues that they deal with every day. These are “the problems in America, problems which actually touch them very deeply and much more than the normal audience going to the A.R.T.,” she said.
“I’m not a change agent,” said Smith. “But I hope my work causes people to commit themselves to change. I hope my work gives them ideas and inspiration.”