When Anna Deveare Smith first put "Fires in the Mirror" on a stage in New York, only a few months after the Crown Heights riots of August, 1991, she portrayed 26 characters in a 90-minute play that was staggering in its impact. The riots began when a van driven by a Lubavitcher man (an ultra-conservative Jewish sect whose world headquarters are in the neighborhood) went out of control, veered onto a sidewalk and killed a seven-year-old Caribbean-American boy. On a hot summer night, tensions–including racial ones–were high, and besides, the Jews who had lived in the neighborhood for almost a century were extremely protective of their turf, and as many resented the politics and religiosity of the Lubavitchers as were bothered by the changing racial mix of the neighborhood. (A personal note: I was born in that neighborhood and lived there the first 16 years of my life.)
A few hours later, with a background of rock-throwing, fires and breaking glass, a group of young black men stabbed to death a Jewish student visiting from Australia. For four days, fires and fights raged. Almost 200 people were injured, about half that many were arrested, property damage was in the millions.
Smith interviewed people on both sides of the divide, wrote 29 separate monologues (three people spoke twice) and went on stage. The monologues represented people on both sides, some famous or important, a few anonymous, many just residents.
Mustard Seed Theatre opened the fierce, angry drama last night on its Fontbonne University stage, with Lori Adams keeping everything very taut and passionate. The number of monologues and the running time have been reduced by about a third, and Michelle Hand and Rory Lipede divide the monologues. Both are excellent; Lipede, a Fontbonne alum now working and living in New York, delivers beautifully as Al Sharpton, and if she occasionally sounds like a caricature, well, given Al, caricatureization (a newly made-up word) is difficult to avoid. She's also strong as nasty activist Sonny Carson and the angry Norman Rosenbaum, brother to Yankel, the murdered student.
Hand, one of the organizers of the late–and mourned–Orange Girls, speaks as two Lubavitcher rabbis, Joseph Spielman and Shea Hecht, who are sorry that the little boy was killed, but that accidents happen, and an accident should not cause such rage and passionate desire for revenge. She's fine there, and in several other guises, but seemed strongest as Roz Malamud, who lives in the neighborhood and is a Lubavitcher. She points out that "they want what we want," to live quietly and peacefully in a nice house, to have a job and food on the table and school for their children. But she wonders if that is possible.
Courtney Sanazaro's set, looking a little like a post-Apocalyptic movie, is effective, and a pair of television monitors identify each person as the actress starts the monologue. Kirsten Wylder designed costumes that are easily changed, but provide sufficient information with a hat, or a sweater, to give each person an identity.
"Fires in the Mirror" is strong stuff, but Smith's writing and use of language are such that it's a play that a family can see, if only to learn how relatively small events can mushroom into tragedy.
At the Mustard Seed Theatre, Fontbonne University, through Feb. 7
–Joe