Staging Charisma: Anna Deavere Smith’s Black Feminist Theater of the Multitude

Abstract

Abstract Recently, scholars in American studies have begun to trace the literary and cultural history of charisma, an especially slippery term which most often connotes spectacular, individual male leadership. In this article, I suggest that Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim theatre provides an alternative notion of this term. Specifically, Smith’s plays enact a Black feminist mode of collectivist charisma, one which has been and can be transported from stage to streets and vice versa. I focus here on Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), a one-woman show that Smith created by interviewing and impersonating dozens of people involved in or affected by the Rodney King “riots.” While the public primarily remembers this moment through King himself, or through spokespeople such as Bill Clinton or George H. W. Bush, Smith refuses either to create protagonists or to channel individualist charisma by staging a multitude. Further, Smith’s decentered theater proffers a collective approach to remembering the broader post-civil rights ethnic and racial tensions that led to the 1992 LA Crisis. Indeed, I suggest that we experience Twilight as part of a performance history of contemporary Left protest by drawing out the similarities between Smith’s multivocal plays and today’s “leaderful,” Black-feminist-led movements for racial justice.