Stylistic and Structural Choices in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities

Anna Deavere Smith's unique style of drama in her play Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities integrates theatre with journalism in order to bring to life and examine real social and political events. Each scene is created directly from an interview that Smith had held with the character, although Smith arranges the character's words according to her own purposes. She captures the essence of the characters she interviews, distilling their thoughts into a brief scene that provides a separate and reasonable perspective on a particular situation or idea.

Via the stylistic choices made by Smith, the play never depicts the actual accident and the murders and attacks that followed the implications and aftermath are visible within the characters’ recollections. John Leonard of New York Magazine says that Smith’s juxtaposition of different interview subjects allows the viewer to see “around corners, into recesses” where the social constructs of race, gender, and class identity has kept people from realizing their many commonalities (Leonard). The extremely diverse and seemingly disparate voices extend from the Reverend Al Sharpton to an orthodox Jewish female graphic designer to the father of the child killed in the accident. The dialogue chosen by Smith cuts through the media exaggeration and misrepresentation of both groups with unflinchingly honest and vivid depictions of neighborhood residents with varying stances and statuses. While Smith’s dialogue emphasizes the characters’ individual differences, she also focuses on the common threads of humor, hope, and despair evident in their words. The book’s themes live within the narratives; forgiveness, empathy and personal and community identity are embodied in the memories and opinions that Smith’s characters express.

The interviews are deftly woven together, leaving the reader with the sense that progress and understanding can truly be achieved. Fires in the Mirror proves the necessity for open dialogue, for heart-felt words and active listening. “There’s nothing to hide/ you can repeat every word I say,” declares Carmel Cato, the father of the first victim, within the final pages of the play (Smith 138).

Smith’s choice of Ntozake Shange’s interview as the first scene of the play serves to give us a warning of what should not be done. Smith purposefully uses Shange’s interview to contrast identity and race, through the desert metaphor; “we take with us that part of the desert that the desert gave us/ but we’re still not the desert” (Smith 12). This interview is a precursor to the all racial tension, saying that we are part of a race, but not actually the race. In the case of Fires in the Mirror, it is equivalent to stating that a black child being killed by a Jewish man, and subsequently a Jewish man being killed by a Black man, is not a racial conflict between Black people and Jewish people.

Perhaps an even more profound interview was the last one. Carmel Cato, father of Gavin Cato, the black child who was killed, opens up to Anna Deavere Smith. As Smith herself mentions in an interview, she had “never heard anybody journey in a language across so many realms of experience.” Carmel Cato spoke of vastly varying details “from the facts of a personal experience, to his own belief system and his own sensitivity-his power-to the circumstances of his birth” (Martin 52). What is even more interesting is that Smith also states that Carmel Cato had not been prompted for the circumstances of his birth; he had stated this of his own accord. Cato’s interview is profound not only because he was directly affected by the event, but also because of his variety of statements and his heart-felt words.

One of the key tools in Smith's artistic process is the ability to render the words in poetic verse, allowing her to arrange each character's words from their respective interviews in an aesthetically pleasing form, and to emphasize certain words and phrases that she wants the reader to find important and that express the rhythm of the character’s speech. Smith also includes pauses, breaks noted by dashes, and nonsensical noises like "um" to capture a sense of character and real speech.

But why is it that Smith would choose this unique format of presenting a play? In conventional play writing, the character is a complex fiction created collectively by the actor, the playwright, the director, the stenographer, the costumer, and the musician. The whole team works together to create onstage a believable, if temporary, social world. Smith works differently. She does not "act" the people you see and listen to in Fires in the Mirror. She "incorporates" them. Her way of working is less like that of a conventional Euro-American actor and more like that of Native American, and Asian ritualists. Smith works by means of