In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991, a car in a motorcade of Hasidic Jews accidentally hit and killed the seven-year-old son of an immigrant family from Guyana. Tales of negligence in the incident (the Hasidic ambulance was said to have ignored the boy and his injured sister in favor of the Jews) were directly linked to the fatal stabbing just hours later of a Hasidic student from Australia by angry, young West Indian men. The resulting riots between blacks and Jews brought a buried, simmering conflict to full boil.
Fires in the Mirror weaves together the reflections of 24 witnesses, artists, and political leaders in an attempt to challenge what we think and what they think, and to help map out the distance between both. What is most striking about Smith's interviews here and elsewhere is how what we assume to be purebred words become elusive mongrels, how a complexity of prejudices comes tearing at us midway through a seemingly benign statement, then disappears, only to come howling back again, biting at its own tail. Smith's subjects are often really saying two things or more at once, and the natural reaction is to further muddy the issue with our own agendas.
Director Steven E. Alter leads us through this melee, with his performers--Leslie DoQui, Joanne Klein, Dawson Nichols, and David Scully--serving as both messengers and Greek chorus. The use of more than one actor, however, guides us through the fray just a bit more than necessary. Multiple actors shifting about Craig Wollam's big, bright neighborhood set--however much their activity mirrors our inner journey--lessens some of the discomfiting nuances and mysteries of the piece. When watching Smith inhabit her people, you are left to make most of the choices and fit the disparate pieces together, which can be deeply unsettling. In Intiman's production, the characters judge each other. Having an African American character listening to a Jewish character's private confession removes part of the decision-making process and chooses who to pit against whom; Smith is more expansive than that. Alter's theatrical conceit gives too-solid form to confrontations that you should be having with yourself.
None of this is to suggest that the performances don't work. Alter has assembled a fine group here, whose interpretations can still inspire the collective buzz of introspection the piece requires. Joanne Klein does a great take on Reverend Al Sharpton, and her handling of Norman Rosenbaum, the murdered student's barrister brother, is among the evening's more eloquent treatments. Minister Conrad Muhammed, a Farrakhan representative, is the best of Dawson Nichols' superb portrayals, and David Scully's savvy riff on director George C. Wolfe provides my favorite Baldwinesque quote: "My blackness does not exist in terms with your whiteness.... It exists." Occasionally a sense pervades the proceedings that the impersonations are part of the "ride," whereas Smith's bravura solo characterizations form a subtler vessel by which we get to the words. There's a little extra swagger here, a few knowing nods that I think Alter should have curbed. DoQui, in particular, needs to tuck away the heart she's wearing on her sleeve (though she's extremely moving as the dead boy's father).
Alter maintains the ebb and flow of the textual tension--these are blistering words--but the tension in the play's structure sometimes dissipates. It's a fleet two hours, to be sure, but the monologues don't always seem to cling to each other or to the whole. The evening flies by too cleanly; too many of its ambiguities go unnoticed.
Smith's oeuvre is, though, for my money, the most stunning expression of American multiracial rage and despair since Baldwin's writing. In his own Fire, Baldwin referred to this country's absence of love "not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." For all its faults, Intiman's Fires in the Mirror strongly suggests that we pursue that love. Though we hear Robert Sherman, a Human Rights Commissioner, wisely inform us that "we have a lousy language on the subject" of prejudice, Smith and this production posit the idea that it is not the language, but the listening, that is deficient.
