Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Smith, Anna Deavere - Jan Stuart (review date 24 March 1994)

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Jan Stuart (review date 24 March 1994)

SOURCE: "Twilight: Group Therapy for a Nation," in Newsday, March 24, 1994.

[In the following review, Stuart lauds Smith's deft handling of complex characters and situations in Twilight.]

Toward the end of her heroic docu-theater event about the police beating of Rodney King and its violent aftermath, Anna Deavere Smith does something very, very clever.

Having impersonated dozens of participants in the 1992 Los Angeles maelstrom for some two hours, Smith steps into the shoes of Maria, a juror in the second Rodney King trial. We like Maria. She's theatrical, a spiky, pull-no-punches sort with a few choice words reserved for her fellow jurors. "Brain-dead," for starters.

One by one, Maria takes aim and caricatures each of her colleagues with their psychic pants down, constructing before our eyes a devastating archetype of group dynamics and the tortuous process by which strangers...

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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