During the month of April there were plenty of reminders in newspapers and magazines, on radio and TV, of the civil disturbance that rocked Los Angeles twenty five years ago. I’ve seen plenty of coverage of those events over the years, but for my money the most honest and most insightful account of what went down is still Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.
I went back and watched it again recently. If you’re not familiar it, Smith started by interviewing scores of people who lived in LA at the time the violence broke out. Using only the words of these witnesses, she constructed a one-woman show where she transforms herself into one character atfer another, weaving together an amazingly complex panorama, not just of the events of April 1992, but of the city at that time.
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it highly. A video of the entire performance is available via WNET, a PBS affiliate. Here’s the link.
The Horizon and the Skyline 