Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Smith, Anna Deavere - Anna Deavere Smith with Steve Proffitt (interview date 11 July 1993)

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Anna Deavere Smith with Steve Proffitt (interview date 11 July 1993)

SOURCE: An interview in Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1993, p. M3.

[In the interview below, Smith discusses the effects of the 1992 race riots on Los Angeles and her reasons for writing Twilight.]

One critic calls her the most exciting individual in current American theater. Another complains her work is emotionally unengaging and analytically shallow. She's been praised as a keen social observer of Los Angeles and condemned as an outsider who has exploited the city in tragedy. Whatever their opinions people are talking about Anna Deavere Smith and her one woman show, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Her performance about the violence following the verdict in the Rodney G King-beating trial completes a five-week run at the Mark Taper next Sunday.

Smith, 42, sprang to prominence last year, with another one-woman show about a racial clash, Fires in the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works∗
3. Criticism
   1. Anna Deavere Smith with Steve Proffitt (interview date 11 July 1993)
   2. Richard Hornby (review date Autumn 1993)
   3. Jan Stuart (review date 24 March 1994)
   4. Michael Feingold (review date 5 April 1994)
   5. Robert Brustein (review date 2 May 1994)
   6. Sean Mitchell (review date 12 June 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright