PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Ruffolo
It’s August 1991. A motorcade traveling through the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, has a terrible accident. A Hasidic man is driving a car that veers onto a sidewalk, killing seven-year-old Gavin Cato. Gavin is black. The man, Jewish. Three hours later, a visiting Jewish scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded and stabbed to death by a group of young black people in what appears to be revenge for Gavin’s death. The ensuing three days and four nights in the surrounding community are filled with the sights and sounds of riots, firebombs, looting and more violence.
Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, which opened last weekend in a fine production by Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, explores this tragedy in a series of 26 different people in 29 different monologues. Playwright Anna Deavere Smith constructed the monologues based on real life interviews with witnesses, politicians, community leaders and others immediately following the riots. The production uses “documentary theater” (a mix of theater and journalism) to explore the underlying racial tensions in America.
The first 50 minutes display the “voices” in six sections: Identity, Mirrors, Hair, Race, Rhythm and Seven Verses. The remaining hour focuses solely on the Crown Height tragedy. Directors Marcella Kearns and C. Michael Wright have wisely let the “voices” speak for themselves, using a minimum of staging and props (chalkboards to lets us know who’s talking). In the hands of the two superb veteran actors, Elyse Edelman and Marti Gobel, the fires burn brightly, and the audiences clearly feels “the heat” and growing rage which ignited the Crown Heights tragedy.
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Playing 26 different characters with the ability to quick change and make them fully dimensional is a credit to Gobel and Edelman and fascinating to watch. Using a hat, a walk, a different vocal inflection, the real-life characters come to life. We see Gobel as Rev. Al Sharpton, professor and political activist Angela Davis and Carmel Cato, father of Gavin, who puts out fires in a touching, heartfelt tribute to his son and a cry for racial equality. Then, there’s Edelman as a rapper, a Jewish housewife, a rabbi, all believable, all with their own points of view finely delineated within the simmering racial tensions.
Mirrors can distort the reality of what we see, and Fires in the Mirror reminds us that we all see what’s reflected back to us given our own perspectives, experiences, lives. And in this “mirror,” the “fire” of rage and anger can burn easily within us as well as outside of us.
“This is the match that lit the powder keg,” one character foretells toward the end of Fires. “But it’s going to happen again. And again.” Unfortunately, truer words were never spoken. Until now.
Through Sunday, Oct. 13, at Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, call 414-291-7800 or visit milwaukeechambertheatre.com.
