Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Reading Response 3
I read Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles” my freshman year at UC Davis. Up until this point, I did not know very much about the Rodney King riots, or how they affected a wide variety of people. Anna Deavere Smith includes many different personalities in this play, and it is fascinating to see how each of them has reacted to this event. I also enjoy Deavere-Smith’s close attention to detail for each character she conveys. She describes everything about them, including what they are wearing, their particular mannerisms, and how they talk. This gives the actor a chance to really become the character that Deavere-Smith has written. This play involves many different racial groups, and Deavere-Smith does a great job of portraying the different feelings experienced during this time period. The Rodney King story caused different reactions from people; there are some who are in favor of Rodney King, and others who are in favor of the police. I also like how Anna Deavere Smith portrays characters from different backgrounds that not only include race, but also factors like profession and age. She pays very close attention to each character’s sentence structure, and in my opinion this in itself adds a lot to each character.
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I feel like the paying close attention part of the writer is what made the play so successful. She made sure people understand that the ones speaking are just everyday people who experienced the not-everyday things. All the movements, changes in voices made it real and powerful. Maybe those details was what made you do good in the act.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I like how she has multiple points of view in the play. This lets you see the whole story, and understand how different people feel about the riots. One of the problem with some history textbooks, is that they only give you the point of view that they want to give you. You can never fully understand history if you view it from America or California's point of view all the time. This is one of the things that I have never liked about learning history in high school.
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