Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

One thing the play clearly establishes is that it is part of a long and extensive timeline of race struggle. The memory of the race riots of the 1960s (Anonymous College Student; Maxine Waters; Otis Chandler) crops up throughout the play. So, too, does the legacy of a retreating, unfulfilled Civil Rights Movement. This is read directly in the words spoken as well as the visual and verbal symbols which form the backdrop: the “bloodstained banner” of black struggle and its many “vestments”: Martin Luther King iconography, Malcolm X hats, Black Panther berets, the Roots TV series. On the stage, where all these monologues were intended to be performed, these symbols would have been visible statements in their own right, casting their own allusions and influencing audience reception.

This is instructive on many levels. Most simply, it places the Los Angeles riots in a long historical frame of black struggle within and against systematic racial injustice. Police brutality and disproportionate response—from lynch mobs to forced sterilization to mass incarceration—has been a part of that legacy. In this sense, Rodney King, as “Big Al” claims, was “nothing new” and he makes the point clearly by suggesting it happens every day within the county jails, which are disproportionately filled with black men.