Reading week 2

Reading – Week 2

Bonney, J. (2000). Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Anna Deavere Smith

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·         Uses stories people tell her to create work based on race, racism and minorities that are discriminated.

·         In Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 she talks about the policemen that were caught on camera beating up someone, but then acquitted for it.

·         Smith brings to life something that has happened and is now swept under the rug, she looks at them again to bring them back to life, looking at them from a different view of a conventional experience.

·         The audience becomes part of her ‘I’ as a collective ‘we’.

Twilight: Los Angeles 1992

Character – Elvira Evers, a general worker and cashier at the Canteen Corporation

The character has turned up, accidentally or not, into a place where violence is happening, and as a result she is hot. She is pregnant and there is fear for her baby, but it survives even though the bullet gets lodged into the baby’s elbow. The line that encapsulates this piece is ‘Why you? You don’t mess with none of those people. Why they have to shoot you?’ The story is obviously about racial hatred and discrimination, but is made more controversial because a pregnant woman is now the victim. There is a sense of self-realisation at the end when she realises she should have opened her eyes to see what was going on around her. The piece is about innocent people becoming involved as victims of racism and racist violence/clashes.

Character – Mrs Young-Soon Han – a former liquor store owner

This is about a woman who is discriminated against for her ethnicity. Because she is Korean and has a car and a house, she is not seen by many to be discriminated against, or struggling. But she is worse off than any other ethnicity or race because of prejudice and cross racial/cultural clashes. Due to there being no Korean politicians or people in power, they have little or no say in society’s happenings. The story highlights that racism in not confined to black people, but to all ethnicities and races.

Character- Twilight Boy – organiser of Gang Truce

This is a situation where someone tries to setup a truce, a realistic one, but finds themselves in limbo, or twilight. He tries not to affiliate black with night, death or any negativity. The poem realises that they are of very few people in this limbo state between two sets of people.

The stories are all about racism, but not the racism of a white man vs a black man, but the struggle of the unseen people, the unheard people who are innocent and caught up in somebody else’s war, people who are discriminated against by more than one race but have no social voice, and people who are striving for a truce but find themselves as in betweeners, neither oppressed or oppressive.