Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Gordon Davidson’s Legacy

Director Gregg T. Daniel on directing Anna Deavere Smith’s revised docudrama

By Steven Leigh Morris

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South Los Angeles, 1992: Family salvaging possessions after uprising.

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They threatened to kill him, taunted him with racial epithets, urged him to run, which he did, then they beat him some more, inflicting a broken leg and multiple face fractures from as many as 56 baton strikes.

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It was different century. It was different country. Yes, it was the United States, but it was a different country nonetheless. And it happened in Los Angeles.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 3, 1991, a patrol car of the California Highway Patrol spotted a driver speeding westbound along the 210 Freeway around Sunland Boulevard. A chase ensued at speeds of up to 115 miles per hour. The Black driver, Rodney King, later said he was terrified of being sent back to jail. After he exited the freeway, LAPD patrol cars and a helicopter joined the pursuit, finally stopping King on Foothill Boulevard adjoining Hansen Lake. A quartet of White LAPD officers tased and beat the intoxicated but unarmed King mercilessly. They threatened to kill him, taunted him with racial epithets, urged him to run, which he did, then they beat him some more, inflicting a broken leg and multiple face fractures from as many as 56 baton strikes.

Meanwhile, from his balcony across the street, a neighbor, George Holliday, recorded the beating for 89 seconds on his newly purchased video camera. It was one of the first times in the sordid history of such violent police/community relations that such abuse was recorded and sold to local news station KTLA, which, in turn, sold the footage to national cable outlet CNN, which replayed it endlessly. (1991 predated social media.)  All charges against King, including evading arrest, were dropped. The four LAPD police officers were indicted by Los Angeles Grand Jury on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force by a police officer.  

It was over one year later, on April 29, 1992, that all four police officers were acquitted in a Simi Valley courtroom, triggering a violent and fiery flashpoint starting early that same evening at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues in South Los Angeles, and leading to a three-day binge of violence that traversed north, along a corridor of Korean-owned businesses, many of which were looted and burned to the ground. The initial police response was lethargic. Mayor Tom Bradley called for a citywide curfew. Eventually, Governor Pete Wilson called in the National Guard and President George Bush sent in federal troops. By the next morning, hundreds of fires burned across the city. Eventually the insurrection approached the Wilshire Corridor, but stopped short of Beverly Hills. The three days of unrest resulted in the deaths of over 60 people, over 2,000 people injured, 3,000 buildings destroyed and over $1 billion in property damage.

Gordon Davidson’s Legacy

Gordon Davidson, founding artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum

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As Daniel pointed out, Davidson was doing Equity and Inclusion decades before anybody else was even talking about it.

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As part of his oft-stated aim of bringing various communities of Los Angeles into the rehearsal halls and onto the stage of the Mark Taper Forum (Luis Valdez, Chay Yew, Luis Alfaro, Culture Clash), that theater’s founding artistic director Gordon Davidson commissioned playwright-performer Anna Deavere Smith to conceive, write and perform a docudrama swirling around those events of 1992. (As Daniel point out, Davidson was doing Equity and Inclusion decades before anybody else was even talking about it.)  What Smith created was Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a fastidiously researched solo performance with dozens of characters. It premiered at the Taper in 1994 before transferring to Broadway two years later.

Gregg T. Daniel

Photo credit: Diana Ragland

Slightly more than 30 years after the events of 1992, Center Theatre Group hired director Gregg T. Daniel to stage a new version of the play, which Smith has expanded to five actors. (It does not include Smith as a performer and has already been staged at the Signature Theatre in New York and American Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts.) It starts previews at the Taper on March 8.

Stage Raw spoke with Daniel as he was preparing to start rehearsals. He was not particularly specific about his approach to the new play, other than saying he’s not basing it on the East Coast productions; he’s not interested in staging a museum piece since so much has happened in US race-relations since 1992, and he’s not using the play to promote an agenda but rather to invite audiences to ponder the historical complexities of why we continue to be so hateful to each other. 

The interview spiraled into an animated, free-wheeling and wide-ranging conversation on topics ranging from the culture wars, the meaning of “justice,” the difficulty of even discussing race in America, grievance versus abuse, the daunting challenges facing the American theater, and inevitably, invariably, Gordon Davidson, who was in many respects the city’s star impresario in his day. (Davidson launched the Taper as its founding artistic director in 1967, he stepped down in 2005 and died in 2016.) In many ways, he was the prince of a now lost civilization called Los Angeles theater — “lost” because it’s slipping from memory, and its current incarnation is struggling to find its way.

Perhaps the reason our conversation became so electrified is that we’re of the same generation, of a certain age — we share so many of the same values, the same reference points, both in theater and its larger purposes, and in a history of a Los Angeles that remains enshrined in our memories.

Daniel is also the artistic director of Lower Depths Theatre in Los Angeles, which recently partnered with a theater company in Pasadena, A Noise Within, to present new plays, all written by minority playwrights, about poverty.

On the day we spoke, the Memphis Police Department was set to release the video of the Tyre Nichols beating by five police officers who, in the spirit of the LAPD of 1991, pounded an unarmed Black man after a routine traffic stop, resulting in his death. Unlike King, however, Nichols, was not intoxicated, and had no criminal record. These police actually told him they were going to kill him — for reasons that are unfathomable, as he had committed no crime, past or present. Their threats prompted his life-preserving reaction to run. His running for his life became the rationale for beating him to death. From the moment he was pulled over, Nichols was a dead man running, and he knew it. And these police officers were Black. 

Los Angeles, 1992 – Burned out industrial building

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“Yeah, that’s a tricky one. ‘Cause you know things have swung in some ways in a very positive way. [But in other ways], the correction, [responding to] White Privilege and White power, is so severe, that I do, I find it tricky.”

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Stage Raw:  Isn’t it comforting to know that in our current cultural climate, such lethal bigotry can be color-blind?

Here, Daniel winces, rolls his eyes, tries to laugh, but can’t. . .

Gregg T. Daniel: Oh boy, it’s amazing that these conditions with law enforcement and minority communities . . .What is it with law enforcement that a 29-year-old-man’s life [can be taken] at a traffic stop, another life? So again, these conditions cry out for. . . Can we examine this? With all the progress we’ve had, with the Obama years, with Black Lives Matter, We See You White Theatre, so much has happened cataclysmically, yet these social conditions [that lead to such unwarranted and disproportional violence against People of Color] still exist.

Stage Raw: They’re probably more entrenched.

Daniel: Yeah, they are.

Stage Raw: Here’s a tricky question. And you can tell me to go fuck myself if you want. It really does have to do with the contemporary climate. I just find it difficult, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I don’t think it’s because I’m White, because People of Color have told me the same thing . . . Gordon’s [Gordon Davidson] whole thing was, let’s have a conversation. Let’s invite the city into this forum [the Mark Taper Forum], and let’s have a conversation to rectify these issues. . . 

Daniel: You’re very right. . .

Stage Raw: And that seems very difficult now . . .

Daniel: I agree. . .

Stage Raw:  . . . to say anything, from fear of being attacked, no matter how mild-mannered . . . or, you don’t have the right to say it.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. ‘Cause you know things have swung in some ways in a very positive way. [But in other ways], the correction, [responding to] White Privilege and White power, is so severe, that I do, I find it tricky.

I have to re-think things in ways now, even things like pronouns . . .  No, but there are things now that I have to consider. I teach at USC, in the School of Dramatic Arts, and our pedagogy has been under intense review by the instructors, by our chairperson, and we’re doing this thing called Dismantling White Power and White Privilege. So, what does that look like? . . . . Who do we then teach and [what do we] expose to students? All these questions: I talk to my colleagues and by the end of the day, we’re tired, ‘cause, okay, I think: did I unintentionally  say or do  something that might have been offensive?  . . . And I think we can only stumble and be awkward. In this time, we have to admit that we’re going to stumble and be awkward, but let’s find the humanity in each other and let’s give ourselves grace, let’s give ourselves time, until we can ferret out what it takes to have a conversation about race, about the inequities in racial injustice and economic injustice. It’s a weak, mild answer. But that’s all I can say.

But it’s going to be difficult. I’m faced with it all the time. What do I say to this theater company, this White theater company, this primarily White institutional theater company? ‘Cause they’re calling on me to do this. . . And why are they calling on me? And should I even answer?  And their efforts to be more inclusive and diverse . . . I do believe those efforts are genuine.

Stage Raw: Well that was going to be my next question. Because an argument has been made, and I don’t know if it’s true, but when you talk to guys like Luis Alfaro, and they’re talking about a system that has locked out what is now the majority population in Southern California, has been locked out by White institutional theater, let’s just spring open the door and let’s be inclusive. And guys like Jon Lawrence Rivera [Playwrights Arena, Los Angeles], they’re saying the same thing.  Fine. That is the ideal.

Daniel: Yes

Stage Raw: Swing the gates open and make sure that everybody has a chance. Then, suddenly, some White people no longer find themselves with the opportunities they once had, I know, boo-hoo, but they’re saying from what they’re seeing happening all around them: Bigotry is being replaced with bigotry. And they’re not condoning in any way the awful history of bigotry that has stifled opportunities of so many people who don’t look like them, but at the same time, it’s a philosophical question, if this is the case, if this is actually the case, are we moving forward if we replace bigotry with bigotry?

Daniel: Well I agree. But if we look at instances of Nataki Garrett being threatened with her life because she’s now leading Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I mean . . .

Stage Raw: Yes.

Daniel: I’m not doing this to trump you . .

Stage Raw: Yes, I know.

Daniel: I’m just saying, look here’s a Black woman, very worthy, there’s no question about her qualifications, about a credentials, they make her artistic director of a primarily White institution, and, look, now she has to travel around with a bodyguard. That is so scary and horrific. What [these White people] are feeling is what we have been feeling for . . .

Stage Raw: Oh, I know, I know . . .

Daniel: And now we have an artistic leader, who has a family, whose life has been threatened. . . It’s not picking one over the other, but that these extreme conditions . . . 

Stage Raw: And these nutjobs. . . . But your argument is, well, not your argument, your rebuttal to my question, a rhetorical question, is based on “all things being equal.” Yet you’re saying they’re not equal. They never were. One side, shall we say the White side, contains more dangerous, more violent nutjobs than the other. And I would say, whoever prevails in this search for “justice” – whatever that means – all things will never be equal, because in American history, in human history, that kind of equality, opportunity, that ideal, supposedly woven into our Constitution, is a kind of mirage, because of human nature. Because we’re tribes. And we gravitate towards “us” and “them,” in the endeavor to take care of our own. Of ourselves. I know this is cynical, but look at American history. Look at world history.  Whoever claims the power is going to oppress. . . Wasn’t that a lesson from Memphis?

1992 – Police in riot gear, downtown Los Angeles, California

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“These White supremacists have been enabled in so many ways by No. 45 – I won’t say his name – but there was permission given. What was it he said to the Proud Boys, “Stand down and stand by.” He exacerbated the situation. For four years we had a national leader who said “Make America great again,” which really meant ‘Make America White again.'” 

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Daniel: Again these corrections, these reactions are going to happen, but it’s going to take a while . . .

Stage Raw: But is it just race? Is it just about race? There was a wing in the theater, and it was pretty outspoken for a while, here in LA, about keeping old White guys out, but then they started attacking older People of Color who defended, or tried to defend their White compatriots, and there came this realization that this reaction wasn’t about race, or just about race, it was about a generational divide, and ageism.

Daniel: Oh, yes, ageism is . . I felt ageism. Quite frankly in terms of where I am now in my life, there’s a younger generation of playwrights and directors that I do or do not belong to . . . But again, these corrections, if you will, are going to happen. It’s going to take a while. But threatening the life of the Black artistic director in Oregon, it just scares me to death and makes me want to leave the theater, and who are they going to pick to lead Center Theatre Group? And all these questions keep swirling around, and I can’t answer . . .

Stage Raw: I don’t think there are answers because everybody’s crazy.  Everybody feels they’re right, and everybody feels they’ve been wronged. Everybody. And that’s why you have these White lunatics threatening the life of a Black artistic director in Oregon, and that’s what stops the conversation. Dead in its tracks. And there’s this sentiment, I’ve heard from so many people, that, look, you’ve got to expect that the pendulum swings way over here as a response, but it’ll settle back. . .

Daniel: Yes, I believe that.

Stage Raw Well, that was the next question. Do you honestly believe that?

Daniel: Yes, I do. And remember, these White supremacists have been enabled in so many ways by No. 45 – I won’t say his name – but there was permission given. What was it he said to the Proud Boys, “Stand down and stand by.” He exacerbated the situation. For four years we had a national leader who said “Make America great again,” which really meant “Make America White again.” And that’s why these instances of racial bias and violence started happening. So we’re at the apex of that thing because they were tacitly told, over four years, “It’s alright.”

And to go back to that old saying, power never concedes. Power never wants to concede. And they felt empowered by the color of their skin. What was it they said in Virginia, “Jews will not replace us.” That’s violence. That to me is violence. And they felt okay with their tiki torches, just like the Klan, and remember when he said at that press conference, “There were good people on both sides.” So they’ve been enabled in a way that makes it seem so extreme. And I think this is their last gasp.

And I think, we have to fling the doors open. [Theater companies will be asked] “What playwrights or LGBT folks did you use? Who is on your Board? Is this just presentational, or is it part of the DNA of your corporation? “

Stage Raw: Yes, that is the question: Is it an illusion?  

Daniel: Is this just one playwright you’re going to use? Are you just going to put up A Raisin in the Sun again? Or are you going to change the entire way seasons are chosen. Is this going to stick? Is this going to last? And I’m optimistic about this. Yes, it’s painful and it’s hard, but it’s okay. We’ve been left out for so long. It’s okay. It’s still not as violent as threatening an artistic director because you don’t like the way she’s leading. And that takes a lot of learning, and re-learning, and re-thinking, Steven. It takes a lot of learning.

Stage Raw: It sure does. It’s like those pronouns. Re-think. Re-learn. I’m a language-based guy. I’m a writer, and when you hear pronouns, and you have to address someone as “they,” and the writer in me says, who is “they” referring to?

Daniel: Of course, of course. I have the same thing. . .

Stage Raw: Let’s say three people are standing in a room. You look in their direction and you want to identify one of them with a pronoun. But the person you’re referring to has asked to go by “they.” So how is one supposed to know who you’re referring to? If you go back to binary pronouns, “he” or “she,” your sentence has better odds of being clear. But “they” would say, “But that’s not accurate either, because that’s not my gender.” And they would be right to say so. And eventually we’ve got to come to some kind of accommodation, maybe we need to re-do the entire language. . .

Daniel: Maybe, because I understand what they’re trying to do too, and they want to be included and define who they are, I get that, their years of oppression. I get that. So I try to, okay, just try to listen, but when you’re at a table and everyone’s identifying themselves by their pronouns and I say, I apologize if I called you this, and I hope they’ll have the grace to . . . but it can be sticky. It can very sticky. . .

Stage Raw: It’s not as if language doesn’t evolve. It changes with every new generation. But typically, a marginalized group, say kids, or a street gang, invent internal codes, new expressions, idioms, to speak to each other, to keep mom and dad, or the cops, out of their conversation. The language usually changes to keep people out, not let people in. So this is an anomaly. Trying to undo the traditions of the Romance languages, which date back to the year 400, and which are entirely based on binary gender identity. It would seem like the entire language needs an overhaul. So let’s add that to the “to-do” list. (Sighs) These are the costs of growing old.

Daniel: (laughing) And youth is wasted on the young.

Stage Raw: Can I quote you on that?

More laughter.

Daniel: And I’m hoping a new generation who will not remember, or who were children when the uprising happened in 1992, I’m hoping this production will remind a whole generation of kids of what this was about. They don’t remember. They’ve heard of Rodney King, but they don’t know what happened. What were the circumstances? That was over 30 years ago.

Los Angeles 1992 – Families rummaging through apartments burned during uprising, South Los Angeles, California

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“When that football player [Damar Hamlin] almost died on the field, and we saw the entire nation galvanized in simply wanting the guy to live. I live in those places. Where we are so often vicious and cruel, we can also be a nation of collective empathy.”

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Stage Raw: I keep thinking about how much has changed, and how little has changed.

The story you brought up at the beginning of this interview, the Black officers, working for the police, who were just unspeakably awful to a perfectly innocent . . . when the uprising happened . . . my memory, was that the cause of the oppression of Rodney King was a kind of institutionalized White bigotry in the police, which is a metaphor of White supremacy, not in the radical sense, but in the culture.  

Daniel: Yes, [former Los Angeles Police Chief] Daryl Gates . .

Stage Raw: But tell me, whose stores and business did these insurrectionists attack?

Daniel: Koreans.

Stage Raw: Not White. And I was thinking, this is the old radical me, I was young then, but I’m thinking, huh, maybe they’ll get to Beverly Hills. Now, burning down any part of a city is not something I would have condoned, but you can’t deny the symbolic significance. But no. They bypassed Beverly Hills. They just burned down mom-and-pop stores owned by Koreans, and the apartment buildings housing poor people in South L.A. 

Daniel: Yeah . . .

Stage Raw: And I’m thinking, fuuuuuck. And here we are 30 years later, with this incident in Memphis. . .

Daniel: And it does beg, what is justice? Everybody has a different definition of justice. South Korean shopkeepers ask what is “just” about what happened to us? What is justice? Who gets it? And how is it apportioned? What is justice to those who are oppressed compared to those in Beverly Hills. So the powerful were unempowered and the unempowered became powerful in that flashpoint moment, because there was fear. . .

Stage Raw: And they picked on all the wrong people.

Daniel: So in the prism of that, 30 years later, I’m hoping that people will take their own message from this production. These things have to be dealt with, visually, auditorily, these things have to be dealt with, and I think the theater is the place to do that.

Stage Raw: No, I agree with you. In closing, when I was Prishtina, in Kosovo, it’s a land that has suffered not with racial but with ethnic and religious divides. They’ve seen genocide, and the word genocide is not hyperbole. They saw 8,000 Muslims killed over 5 days in Srebrenica, and that’s in their living memory. That was in 1994, two years after the Rodney King uprising here. All their theater deals with that. Not always in macabre ways. Sometimes in cabarets. Retelling the horrors through the lens of Agamemnon.

Because the ancient Greeks, that’s all they cared about: Why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep killing each other? The oldest questions in the world. Why do we keep doing this to each other? We’re supposed to be human beings. Other species do not do this. Not on such a scale. And their theater is packed. It’s urgent. It’s immediate. And it’s not commercial.

They say we get the theater we deserve — well we get the theater that reflects the culture we live in. We are in a commercial culture. So much of our theater is saturated by these commercial impulses: How can we sell the most tickets, zombies, movie parodies? Maybe you’ll squeeze a metaphor out of there somehow. And that’s what Gordon Davidson was wrestling with through his life. He emulated the commercial New York theater.

Daniel: He did.

Stage Raw: At the same time, on a parallel almost antithetical impulse, he desperately wanted to create a theater that mattered, that engaged with the local community. And it’s as though these two impulses were at odds.  And sometimes he would take a lot of heat because he followed the former, commercial impulse, and then he would take heat from his Board when he followed the latter: We gotta pay the bills, dude, we’re running in the red.

Daniel: Yes, of course they would feel that way. To keep those three behemoth theaters going. But what a noble fight. I’m sure he had hell from his Board, but what a noble. . . I don’t know if I have that kind of courage to keep going like that, to hire all these artists who were not commercial at all. 

Stage Raw: I wonder if we’re in a King Lear time when we’re all part of a family that’s eating itself alive from the inside. The Whites have behaved abominably, and the justified response contains such belligerence, so that belligerence is now our fallback position. Color blind belligerence. And to sort this out, I think you’re right, maybe only the theater can do this.

Daniel: I think so. I know it’s kind of a dreamy . . . but if the theater can speak to the heart as well as the head. . . . When that football player [Damar Hamlin] almost died on the field, and we saw the entire nation galvanized in simply wanting the guy to live. I live in those places. Where we are so often vicious and cruel, we can also be a nation of collective empathy. That’s what the theater is for.   

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, written and revised by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Gregg T. Daniel. Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; previews March 8-14; Sun., 6:30 pm; Tues-Sat., 8 pm; Sat., 2 pm; opens Wed., March 15, 8 pm; Tues-Fri., 8 pm; Sat., 2 pm; Sun., 1 & 6:30 pm; thru April 9. https://ctgla.org