Offering an image as startling as the meeting of an operating table, a sewing machine, and an umbrella made famous by the surrealists,1 Allen Cooper, a former gang member and an activist for gang reconciliation, recounts seeing an unsettling juxtaposition of a pistol and a bubble gum machine:
I was at one of these swap meets
and a bubble gum machine man pulled a gun out.
Now what a bubble gum machine man doin’ with a pistol?
Who wanna rob a bubble gum machine?
Because we live here, the conditions are so
enormous and so dangerous,
that they have to be qualified to carry a firearm.2
For Cooper, the pairing of gum and gun, innocence and violence, is both remarkable and ordinary. The mystery he initially presents (“what a bubble gum machine man doin’ with a pistol?”) is explained by “the conditions,” the everyday circumstances that are themselves “so/enormous and so dangerous” that they render the collocation of pistol and bubble gum machine necessary and common. If, as Ben Highmore describes, surrealism “is about an effort, an energy, to find the marvellous [sic] in the everyday, to recognize the everyday as a dynamic montage of elements, to make it strange so that its strangeness can be recognized,”3 the image that Cooper provides similarly brings into relief the strangeness of the everyday, but highlights what is horrifying rather than what is marvelous.
The lines above come from Cooper’s conversation with performance artist Anna Deavere Smith. After interviewing approximately two hundred people about the 1992 social upheaval most commonly known as the Los Angeles riots, Smith reenacted their responses in a performance titled Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. In the excerpt that Smith later published, Cooper insists that the very designation of certain behaviors and incidents as mundane or spectacular, ordinary or strange, has important repercussions for how people live and what they find credible. Ruminating on the uprising, Cooper explains,
But we’re not basin’ our life on Reginald Denny;
neither are we basin’ our lives on Rodney King.
Only thing we’re expressing through the Rodney King—
through Reginald Denny beating—
it shows how
a black person gets treated in his community.
And it was once brought to light
and shown
and then we still . . . we see no belief,
because they never handled, from the top of the level, the way it
should have been handled,
because they handled it like a soap opera . . .
If you put twenty hidden cameras
in the country jail system
you got people beat worse than that
point blank. (100)
According to Cooper, the widely broadcast beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, which came to emblematize the Los Angeles riots, simultaneously made visible and obscured everyday conditions of physical threat (“how / a black person gets treated in his community”). Cooper argues that although the recording of four Los Angeles police officers beating King, an unarmed African American man, brought attention to issues of racism and police brutality, depictions of this act of violence and the upheaval that followed it as a “soap opera” by the media asserted their exceptional nature, and thus did little to increase public “belief” in quotidian experiences of discrimination and violence, the everyday strangeness of the gun next to the bubble gum machine. Meanwhile, the spotlight put on the beating of white trucker Reginald Denny shifted attention from the violence inflicted on King to the violence inflicted by African American men.
Like Anna Deavere Smith, Elizabeth Wong explored the relationship between the everyday and the spectacular and its influence on interracial relations in her drama Kimchee and Chitlins (1990). The play depicts tensions between black customers and Korean American merchants in New York City and had a staged reading at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles several months after the uprising. It follows the efforts of a reporter, Suzie Seeto, to cover a protest that closely resembles the 1990 boycott of two stores in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Near the end of the drama, after failing to discover the truth about the altercation that triggered the boycott, Suzie remarks, “I still don’t know what happened in the store, and whatever did happen isn’t as important as what has happened. How did such a trivial event cause all this—boycott, court injunction, pain, suffering.”4 Reverend Carter, an African American activist who takes leadership of the boycott, responds, “History, Suzie, has often been triggered by such trivial events. Someone in Montgomery, Alabama, orders a black woman to give up a seat on a bus. Mahatma Gandhi created a free India all because he got thrown off a train” (441). For Suzie, her search for an accurate account of the instigating dispute has led her not to the truth, as she had anticipated, but to the limits of her reporting. As Reverend Carter reminds her, however, the everyday interactions that she finds both elusive and trivial can give rise to large movements of resistance, producing history from routine.
Delving into the connections between the crises in Los Angeles and New York and daily encounters in inner-city neighborhoods, Twilight and Kimchee and Chitlins draw attention to the representational practices that constrain the possibilities for effectively addressing tensions. The semantic overlap between the “mediation” of representation and the “mediation” of arbitration is particularly appropriate here, as it points to a correlation between the medium through which such events are portrayed, and its impact on efforts at reconciliation. Accounts of antagonistic relations between black customers and Korean American merchants that proliferated during and after the 1990 boycott and the 1992 uprising evinced a recurrent interest in the role that the conduct of store owners and employees may have played in aggravating the communities in which their businesses were located. Reporters, community and government representatives, and affected individuals all stressed a link between the conflicts in New York and Los Angeles and seemingly trivial behaviors such as making eye contact or giving change, and raised the question of how modifying such mannerisms might prevent future disputes. These deliberations on the habits of interaction between merchants and customers, however, tended to presume and affirm broad notions of racial difference, evading biological essentialism only through generalizations about clashing cultures. Exemplifying the contradictions of the racial mundane, everyday behaviors came to embody both intractable differences and their potential attenuation through the retraining of individual conduct.
Kimchee and Chitlins and Twilight draw attention to the limitations of media representations of the boycott and the uprising to suggest the possibility of reconfiguring habits of perception and interaction through a different kind of “mediation,” namely that of performing the mundane across the social divides intensified by the conflicts. Exploring the effects of assuming the gestures, mannerisms, and speech of others, these performances grapple with the dangers of such reenactments even as they demonstrate that traversing racial boundaries and mixing theatrical and journalistic conventions can expose the multiple, unremarked exchanges that trigger and exacerbate antagonistic encounters. The two works moreover supplement theories of theater that emphasize its ability to offer a distanced, critical view of established social relations with models of cross-racial performance that materialize the productive entanglement of bodies at the moment of sight and speech. They therefore investigate theater’s potential to reconceive the messy intersections of habitual behaviors and habituated perceptions that make representing and ameliorating interracial conflicts so risky and difficult.
On January 18, 1990, an argument between Bong Ok Jang, the manager of the Family Red Apple Grocery in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Giselaine Felissaint, a customer of the store, led to allegations by Felissaint that Jang physically attacked her after accusing her of shoplifting. Jang meanwhile insisted that Felissaint became angry after a dispute over the bill and began throwing produce at him. The difficulty of verifying either of these accounts left the truth of what happened between Felissaint and Jang unclear. This incident precipitated a months-long boycott of the Family Red Apple Grocery and a nearby store that was also owned by Korean Americans. These demonstrations were among a series of boycotts in New York in the 1980s and 1990s that set Korean American store owners and employees against black protestors, who declared that the merchants treated customers with disrespect and contributed to the economic depression of the neighborhoods in which they ran their stores.
Similar tensions between merchants and customers came to the fore in Los Angeles on March 16, 1991, when liquor store owner Soon Ja Du shot and killed teenager Latasha Harlins. Du apparently saw Harlins place a carton of orange juice in her backpack and grabbed the bag as Harlins approached the counter to pay, mistaking her actions as an attempt to shoplift. Harlins then punched Du, who threw a stool at the teenager and shot her as she turned to exit the store. Captured by security cameras, this confrontation occurred just thirteen days after another violent encounter recorded on video: the beating of Rodney King by four Los Angeles police officers. Through the repeated juxtaposition of the two videos, these incidents became intertwined as confirmations of a persisting disregard for the lives of black Americans. The results of the two trials further aggravated tensions. A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter and recommended sixteen years in jail, but the presiding judge sentenced her to five years of probation instead. Several months later, on April 29, 1992, a mainly white jury in the suburb of Simi Valley charged officer Laurence Powell with one count of excessive force in the King beating but otherwise acquitted the officers of all charges. The verdict sparked a multiday uprising in Los Angeles during which a clip of several African American men beating white trucker Reginald Denny joined the constellation of videos that came to epitomize the riots. Over fifty people, most of them black and Latino men, died in the upheaval, and large parts of the city were destroyed, with Korean American–owned businesses constituting a majority of those burned and looted.
The New York boycott and the Los Angeles uprising exposed the untenable intersection of various economic and social pressures in neglected urban areas. In the 1980s, cuts in federal funding for social programs and the shipping of jobs to other countries, including South Korea, increased the economic depression of inner-city neighborhoods. Meanwhile, close economic and political relationships between the United States and South Korea created conditions that encouraged South Korean immigration to the United States. Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich argue that the rapid growth of an export-based economy, a repressive government, and relatively depressed wages in South Korea were among the factors that, combined with the easing of U.S. immigration restrictions, prompted many in the South Korean urban middle class to emigrate.5 Arriving in the United States with some capital and access to community “money clubs” (the ggeh), which allowed for the pooling of resources, Korean immigrants were able to establish stores in neighborhoods where the flight of capital made such businesses profitable and affordable—although not affordable enough for residents who were consistently denied bank loans.
Relations between Korean American merchants and black customers were only a part of the complex multiracial and multiethnic topography of the affected neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, increasing numbers of Latino and Asian immigrants moved into these areas through the 1980s as residents and business owners, respectively, while the number of African Americans gradually declined. Peter Morrison and Ira Lowry’s study of the demographics of the Los Angeles uprising includes revealing maps of the residential patterns of different racial groups immediately before the riots. These maps show a concentration of African Americans living in the center of the city, overlapping with neighborhoods in which Latino communities resided; Asian Americans primarily lived at the edge of these areas, and the outer zones were made up of mostly white residents.6 Despite common depictions of the uprising as a black-white or black-Asian conflict, the Los Angeles Latino community suffered a significant portion of the murders, arrests, and property damages. Similar characterizations of the New York boycott in broad racial terms obscured the impact of immigration from both Korea and the Caribbean on Brooklyn neighborhoods like Flatbush. For example, Philip Kasinitz stresses that complicated relationships of both solidarity and antagonism exist in these communities between recent Afro-Caribbean immigrants such as Felissaint and African Americans whose lineage in the United States stretches back multiple generations.7
The prevailing idiom through which the public came to understand interactions between black customers and Korean American merchants tended to elide these complexities and accordingly limited the possibilities for mediation and change. Namely, discussions of potential causes and solutions frequently pointed to “cultural differences” as an instigating factor and focused on the everyday behaviors that seemed to reflect these differences. In her study of the Los Angeles riots and the so-called Black-Korean conflict, Regina Freer notes that although many African Americans and Korean Americans expressed an awareness of the economic circumstances contributing to tensions, they also stressed the significance of a “culture clash”: “Echoing concerns about ‘disrespectful’ merchants, individuals on both sides of the conflict pointed to ignorance of ‘American customs’ on the part of the first generation Korean Americans as being a crucial piece of the conflict puzzle.”8 Among the behaviors of Korean American merchants repeatedly cited as causing friction were the tendencies to avoid eye contact, drop change on the counter, and watch shoppers with suspicion, as well as a general lack of effort to treat customers with respect. The mundane, as what presumably embodied “cultural differences,” became a central concern in debates about the “Black-Korean conflict.”
Despite varying assessments of the importance of these behaviors in relation to socioeconomic issues, the habits of interaction between merchants and customers received much attention across the nation as a critical factor in understanding and ameliorating the crises in Los Angeles and New York. For example, in August 1990, in the midst of the Brooklyn boycott, a conference on “Human Relations: Racial and Cultural Diversity” attended by those of African, Caribbean, and Korean descent included a discussion of Korean customs that might aggravate the clientele of Korean American businesses.9 The numerous stories on the “Black-Korean conflict” that appeared after the riots reiterated this interest in “cultural differences.” In a passage that encapsulates a refrain common in these articles, Rhonda Richards of USA Today relates, “Many blacks and Koreans just don’t seem to understand each other, experts say. There are language barriers, racial stereotypes and cultural differences. Many Koreans avoid eye contact with customers, which they say shows respect. But that infuriates many blacks, used to being shunned at store counters by white clerks.”10 Kathryn Tolbert in the Boston Globe similarly emphasizes a disjuncture between how customers and merchants perceive the latter’s conduct: “Koreans explain the problem between shopkeepers and customers as stemming from cultural differences, such as their reluctance to make physical contact when passing change across the counter—a familiarity that in Korea is inappropriate between businessman and customer—to limited English that inhibits friendly small talk. Customers, meanwhile, view the Koreans as sullen, unfriendly, and racist.”11 In both articles, a single, seemingly minor behavioral tendency—the avoidance of eye or physical contact—comes to exemplify the opposing perspectives and conventions that collide in these encounters. Although both customers and merchants imply that the latter are conducting “business as usual,” the merchants, who are largely recent immigrants, claim that they are running their businesses as they would in Korea, while their customers see their behavior as continuing a long tradition of racial discrimination.
Public interest in these everyday exchanges gave aggrieved residents an opportunity to voice their anger at the behavior of merchants, and store owners an opportunity to suggest that a cultural gap, as opposed to an intent to offend, explained their conduct. Yet the emphasis on “cultural differences” tended to reinforce racial divisions and overshadow the historical and economic circumstances that affected relations between merchants and customers. Kyeyoung Park argues that “the media-led discourse portrays black-Korean conflict as a racial confrontation yet describes the details largely in terms of cultural differences, seldom mentioning the lack of public policy to deal with urban problems such as racism and poverty.”12 Nancy Abelmann and John Lie further stress that popular accounts of hostilities reified “essentialized views of the two ethnic groups,”13 not only obscuring material factors but also encouraging ahistorical notions of difference. The reference to “culture” allowed for an evasion of biological essentialism, yet perpetuated ideas of fundamental racial dissimilarities that obscured, for example, class disparities among Korean Americans and ethnic heterogeneity in black communities. Heon Cheol Lee suggests that these discussions about cultural differences contributed to the tensions that they purportedly explained: “Instead of the conflict being generated by the cultural differences, the conflict itself seems to generate ethnic myths about both Koreans and blacks in America.”14 Arguing that repeated accounts of a culture clash propagated racial divisions, Lee points to the performative nature of this discourse: reiterations of cultural difference, retroactively instituted as the primary cause of conflict, manifested the apparent “truth” of racial difference, and diverted attention away from the historical and structural conditions shaping merchant-customer interactions.
Attempts by government and community organizations to ease tensions by retraining the behavior of merchants, however, only validated sketchy assessments of a fundamental culture clash and encouraged merchants to adopt “nicer” manners that would effectively sustain rather than change the socioeconomic makeup of these neighborhoods. Given that parties offered differing interpretations of the same behaviors, the act or mannerism itself would seem less important than the particular historical or social frame with which various individuals understood such conduct. Nevertheless, changing the behaviors themselves became a crucial component of efforts to ameliorate relations. For example, a committee appointed by the mayor after the New York boycott recommended “cultural exchange programs or sensitivity training” for Korean American merchants.15 Meanwhile, Korean American community organizations ran advertisements in Korean-language newspapers and cable channels to encourage different business practices, and conducted seminars to teach merchants to smile, place change directly into customers’ hands, and offer a thank-you.16 By habituating recent immigrants to the “proper” way to run an American business, these programs for Korean American merchants merely trained them to conform to these norms. Abelmann and Lie point out that “smiling Korean American merchants and understanding African American customers leave both groups in the same place they were in to begin with.”17 Even if such efforts could change everyday interactions between merchants and customers, they would help maintain rather than alter aggravating economic and social conditions.
By focusing exclusively on the relationship between residents and shopkeepers, programs to reduce cultural misunderstandings moreover obscured the role of parties not visibly implicated in the “Black-Korean conflict.” The uprising and the boycott were as much the result of what was and continues to be absent in inner-city neighborhoods (e.g., employment opportunities, public funding for schools and recreational spaces, and a variety of options for purchasing food and other goods), as they were the result of unhappy relationships between the individuals living and working there. Yet in contrast to the hypervisibility of the Korean American “middleman minority,”18 the economic and political influences that determined the terms in which these interactions took place remained largely invisible. For example, corporations profited from the goods sold in the markets, but did not have to bear the brunt of anger at the continuous flow of money out of these neighborhoods. Freer observes, “Because they so often represent the only economic activity in the black community, and are thus held up as examples of success by larger society, Korean merchants come to represent the economic exploitation felt by South Central Los Angeles residents.”19 Eclipsing less provocative factors, the issue of “cultural differences” obscured the responsibility of the government, corporations, and other institutions whose imprints were mediated through the surrogacy of the middleman minority, or felt in the absence of public support and financial investments.20
I am not arguing, however, that everyday interactions between merchants and customers were insignificant, or only significant as a smokescreen for economic factors. The perception of business owners as rude or residents as threatening, for example, had clear consequences. The violent altercation between Du and Harlins and the dispute between Felissaint and Jang are inseparable from the accumulation of everyday tensions and sedimentation of stereotypes. In both cases, persistent, reciprocal suspicions provoked aggressive behaviors that seemed to confirm the perception of hostility. During the riots, the quality of daily relationships between merchants and customers affected the fates of some businesses. Ella Stewart recounts that in one neighborhood, residents protected a store run by a reportedly pleasant Korean American couple, whereas another business nearby was destroyed.21
I therefore direct my critique not at the interest in everyday encounters per se, but rather the propensity in depictions of the “Black-Korean conflict” to detach the mundane from other considerations. Insofar as media reports and responses by government and community organizations emphasized an inherently cultural conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans, they not only reinforced notions of intractable racial difference, but also simplified the historical pressures and material constraints that shape habits of behavior and perception and inform how such habits interact.22
As Bourdieu stresses in his elaboration of the habitus, perceptual and behavioral tendencies are always developed within sociohistorical relationships that they also perpetuate. He argues, “The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.”23 The habitus consists of the quotidian, ostensibly unremarkable ways of seeing and behaving that are all the more influential for their apparent triviality in shaping and transmitting social practices. For Bourdieu, the tacit acquisition and enactment of these conventions reflect and reproduce established relations of difference and inequity, lending existing social conditions their concreteness as well as an inevitable quality.
The grievances that culminated in the boycott and the uprising, however, point to the necessity of complicating Bourdieu’s analysis with a consideration of the interface between habitus developed within markedly differing sociohistorical circumstances. According to Bourdieu, the habitus is rarely questioned because those with similar proclivities tend to congregate: “The habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible, that is, a relatively constant universe of situations tending to reinforce its dispositions by offering the market most favourable to its products.”24 Yet in neighborhoods like those at the center of the boycott and the uprising, rapid demographic changes and distinct financial constraints bring together minority residents and recent immigrants of various, unequal socioeconomic backgrounds, and complicate the construction of a “constant universe of situations.”25 Interactions between merchants and customers of differing habitus would presumably disrupt and alter the effects and meanings of everyday behaviors.26 The apparent reluctance of merchants to make physical contact, for example, might stem from any combination of social conventions and exigencies, but its enactment before customers with their own habits of behavior and perception would determine whether it materializes racism, cultural difference, or class disparity. The significance of these seemingly routine encounters thus lies in both their historical density and their intricate chemistry.
Although Heon Cheol Lee’s analysis of the boycotted stores is not explicitly in conversation with Bourdieu’s theories, his attempt to link the quotidian interactions between merchants and customers to an overdetermined complex of economic and historical circumstances helps elucidate the connections articulated by the habitus. Lee’s study highlights the various structural features of the stores that might contribute to merchant-customer tensions, such as their size (between mom-and-pop stores and supermarkets), lack of formalized customer service, and long hours of business. In addition, he takes into account the impact of a long history of racialization, noting, “Self-consciousness of their minority status and a constant fear of being treated differently are strong currents among both Korean merchants and black customers.”27 When a reliance on human observation to monitor stores converges with the historical criminalization and surveillance of black communities, interactions between merchants and customers are likely to affirm mutual suspicions. Similarly, the economically inflected racialization of Asians as greedy and unscrupulous, and African Americans as delinquent and insolvent facilitates the interpretation of conduct born of specific material constraints as performances of racial difference. Thus, in these encounters between merchants and customers, behaviors informed by a combination of economic necessities, social conventions, and patterns of migration and racialization come to confirm the reality of racial divisions.
The boycott and the uprising moreover illustrate that the very “crises and critical challenges” presumably avoided by the habitus can affirm governing social institutions and relations. On the one hand, the boycott and the uprising announced a rejection of existing conditions, and led those affected by the dramatic protests to question both accepted patterns of behavior and established institutions, including the government, the media, and law enforcement. On the other hand, the absorption of everyday tensions into broad characterizations of a “Black-Korean conflict” encouraged notions of inherent differences, and the targeting of Asian American–owned businesses during the uprising marked an intensification of racial divisions. The link between the mundane and the historical, articulated by the concept of the habitus, remained obfuscated, even (or perhaps especially) by programs that focused on quotidian interactions as a site for alleviating tensions and transforming social relations. As I mentioned above, these programs substituted “nicer” manners for substantial changes.
If both small- and large-scale challenges to the habitus do not necessarily alter the sociohistorical circumstances they embody and perpetuate, what kind of change, if any, is possible through the scrutiny and adjustment of naturalized behaviors? This question, so urgently raised by the uprising and the boycott, has been critical to the development of modern and contemporary theatrical practices and theories. Most famously elaborated by Bertolt Brecht, the argument that theater can affect how we view naturalized behaviors and potentially reflect back on and reshape their constitutive social conditions has been seminal to explorations of the political efficacy of theater. In Elin Diamond’s succinct and commonly quoted formulation, “Performance . . . is precisely the site in which concealed or dissimulated conventions might be investigated.”28 While conventions may go unremarked in the everyday, their reenactment in theatrical performance makes it possible to examine their relationship to social and political concerns. This perspective finds an offhand echo in Bourdieu’s work when he suggests that the distanced observation of established behaviors can lead to a questioning of their purpose and significance: “One only has to suspend the commitment to the game that is implied in the feel for the game in order to reduce the world, and the actions performed in it, to absurdity, and to bring up questions about the meaning of the world and existence which people never ask when they are caught up in the game—the questions of an aesthete trapped in the instant, or an idle spectator.”29 Although for Brecht the ideal spectator is not so much idle as critical, he similarly theorizes that in order to encourage the audience to interrogate (and change) the social conditions represented on the stage, the actor must produce an “alienation effect” that emphasizes a distance from her or his role and detaches “socially-conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp.”30
Exploring the relationships between habitual behaviors and social conflicts, Elizabeth Wong’s Kimchee and Chitlins and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 exemplify the kind of theatrical performance in which “concealed or dissimulated conventions might be investigated.” In confronting the distinct representational problems posed by the “Black-Korean conflict,” these works further suggest that the potential of theatrical performance to mediate tensions rests not just in the critical distance it can provide, but also in the messy entanglements of actors, roles, and audiences that materialize complex networks of influence and association, as well as their gaps. Stressing the potential hazards of exposing the interactions between merchants and customers to the public, these performances caution against assuming that increased attention to and detached depictions of these daily exchanges will lead to a questioning of the untenable conditions they enact and manifest. They suggest that in offering up the behaviors of inner-city residents and merchants for scrutiny, mainstream media accounts only reinforced divisions between these groups while further disengaging those who encounter one another in depressed neighborhoods from those whose invisibility obscures their involvement.31
Explicitly confronting the limitations of media coverage decried by those most involved in and affected by the boycott and the uprising, Kimchee and Chitlins and Twilight propose an alternative model of representing the conflict, one that involves simultaneously observing and embodying others across racial lines. From the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century to recent controversies over casting (such as the debate over Miss Saigon discussed in Chapter 2), cross-racial performance in the United States has historically been dominated by white actors playing other racial and ethnic groups. Although such enactments may manifest contradictory identifications (a dynamic evident, for example, in productions of The Yellow Jacket), Angela Pao argues that they are inextricably tied to the privilege of “white neutrality or invisibility.”32 Pao further notes that only in the past few decades has casting white actors in Asian or Latino roles followed blackface performances in becoming an objectionable practice.33 At the same time, nontraditional casting practices have become more common, with some performances opening up previously unavailable roles to minority actors and others purposefully emphasizing the gap between actor and character to put pressure on established theatrical and social conventions.34
Kimchee and Chitlins and Twilight directly engage with both the troubling history of cross-racial performance in the United States and its more hopeful possibilities. In excavating the nebulous borders between caricature, appropriation, identification, and empathy through reenactments of the mundane, they grapple with the risks of playing those regarded as racial others. Yet they also illuminate the potential of such performances to reveal unrecognized connections—both those that sustain social divisions and those that offer channels for new affiliations. Traversing theatrical and journalistic conventions as well as racial delineations, they suggest the need to complicate and expand Brechtian models of political theater to account for the complex enmeshments of bodies, habits, and perceptions that make reconciling interracial conflicts a particularly challenging task. Kimchee and Chitlins and Twilight accordingly test not only the possibilities of performance suggested by Brecht and Diamond, but also Bourdieu’s argument that “one cannot really live the belief associated with profoundly different conditions of existence, that is, with other games and other stakes, still less give others the means of reliving it by the sheer power of discourse.”35 In staging various attempts to embody the beliefs of others through their habitual behaviors, rather than through “the sheer power of discourse,” these works ask if such performances can have any effect on our respective conditions of existence.
Elizabeth Wong’s Kimchee and Chitlins premiered at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in 1993. A production by the West Coast Ensemble in Los Angeles followed in 1994 and received the NAACP Theatre Award for best production. Written during the Brooklyn boycott, the drama’s timeliness became all too evident with the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. The play traces the efforts of Suzie Seeto, a Japanese American television news reporter, to cover the boycott of a Korean American–owned grocery store. By focusing on how Suzie reports on the boycott, it explicitly questions media accounts, which, under the guise of objectivity, mask the contingencies and uneven distributions of power that inform how a story is told. While drawing attention to problems in press coverage of the boycott, however, the play also asks whether presenting more information and perspectives can lead to truth, empathy, or reconciliation. Stressing instead the mediation of discourse through the body, the play explores how understandings of what happened change when those involved must not only hear another’s perspective, but embody it as well—through the accents, gestures, and habits that materialize their formative histories.
The boycott at the center of the play is fueled by a dispute and alleged physical altercation between a customer, Matilda Duvet, and the store’s owner and employees: Grocer Key Chun Mak, his nephew Willie, and his niece Soomi. Among those protesting the market are residents Nurse Ruth Betty and Barber James Brown, as well as Reverend Lonnie Carter, a political figure of some celebrity who becomes a spokesperson for the boycott. Assigned to cover the protest months after it begins, Suzie works to untangle the competing claims of those involved, while also negotiating the romantic advances and editorial demands of her news director Mark Thompson, and attempts to sabotage her career by news anchor Tara Sullivan.
Throughout the performance, characters spend much time discussing the economic, historical, and social circumstances surrounding the boycott. Wong undercuts the play’s documentary elements, however, with a comic, exaggerated style and a nonlinear structure that jumps between times and places. In the stage directions, Wong stipulates, “The world of the play must be symbolic and not literal. It must reflect the humor of the play, or be humorous in some way” (396). Conventions such as Black and Korean Choruses, the miming of props, and the doubling of roles further reinforce the play’s emphatically nonrealistic style. A journalist herself before becoming a playwright, Wong highlights a tension between the necessity of examining economic and social issues raised by the boycott, and the unavoidable mediation and refraction of information by representational practices.
Moving between the newsroom and the field, the performance underscores the various factors that influence how the boycott reaches the public. When Suzie first approaches the Black Chorus to get an interview, they ask, “Who do you talk to? How do you choose? Do you pick them? Or, do they pick you?” (401). The Black Chorus immediately emphasizes the process of selection that will shape how Suzie tells her story. The play then undermines the homogeneity implied by the Chorus by suggesting that the choice of interview subject is to an extent predetermined by the differential social positions of those participating in the protest. Although Nurse Ruth Betty volunteers to speak for what she calls a “grassroots movement,” she is interrupted by the appearance of Reverend Carter. Carter, as Betty notes, is not from the neighborhood, yet Suzie immediately selects him as a spokesperson, telling the audience, “At last! The leader of the pack” (403). Carter’s notoriety makes him the “natural” choice for a reporter looking to draw attention to her story and quickly settles the question of “do you pick them” or “do they pick you,” as he and Suzie mutually profit from picking each other.
The performance also repeatedly draws attention to the contingencies and imperatives that impact the selection and editing of these interviews for broadcast. Accidental damage to a recording of an interview with the Maks and rivalry between Suzie and Tara lead to a report that includes only the boycotters’ perspective. Mark also occasionally makes unilateral decisions to exclude stories that provide economic and historical context if he deems them uninteresting. Those that do not make the cut include a Korean Church Woman’s explanation of the money-lending system among Korean immigrants that allows them to avoid going through banks, and Ruth Betty’s account of how she rejected the name of her ancestor’s master by taking two first names. The Chorus explains, “As news director, Mark Thompson has the final say. He always has the final word. He decides what you see on teevee, and . . . what you don’t” (445). The drama makes clear that decisions about what counts as newsworthy are inseparable from the hierarchies of the newsroom, as well as mishaps and editorial constraints.
By dramatizing the process of news making, Kimchee and Chitlins is able to include exactly those debates, perspectives, and issues that do not make the final cut, while simultaneously critiquing their exclusion. When Suzie selects portions of her interview with Nurse Ruth Betty for broadcast, the play stages a struggle between journalist and subject over what should be included. Although Suzie initially seems to be listening to a recording of an earlier interview with Ruth Betty, the nurse begins to interject in the “present” of the scene with her opinions on Suzie’s editing:
Nurse Ruth Betty: I been asking the bank for three years now. I need a loan so I can start my own shop in my own neighborhood. I want to get out of working for other people, start working for myself . . .
Suzie Seeto: Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . let’s skip that.
Nurse Ruth Betty: [Insistently.] They say I’m a bad risk. They say, you don’t have the proper collateral. I’ve been trying to get a loan, but no one will give me one . . .
Suzie Seeto: It’s really a side issue.
Black Chorus: It’s the central issue. Put Ruth Betty back in.
Nurse Ruth Betty: Why are you cutting me out?
Suzie Seeto: I’m slotted for a one minute-fifteen package. This is no time for an economics lesson.
Black Chorus: But she’s telling it like it is. She’s giving the story balance, context, motive. (426)
Despite Suzie’s reluctance to spend precious seconds on an “economics lesson,” Ruth Betty and the Black Chorus insist that the boycott is inextricably tied to racist banking practices, and the spatial and temporal flexibility of the stage allows the performance to place them directly in the cutting room to argue their point. Without the comfortable distance between newsroom and field, Suzie must interrupt and silence Ruth Betty as a physical presence with the ability to question her choices directly, as opposed to a recording that she can cut and edit at will. Emphasizing the often arbitrary choices that make up the final broadcast story, the play envisions an alternative editorial process in which decisions about what is or is not relevant are made with, rather than for, the interview subject.
Such strategic placements of actors also help materialize those influences that, despite affecting the news and the events it reports, remain largely hidden. Wong’s stage directions specify, “All characters, including Mark and Tara, must be on stage to witness the action at all times” (396). As the performance begins, the Chorus introduces Mark by telling the audience, “That’s him. Over there. Behind the headlines” (400). By placing Mark on the stage but making explicit his place “behind the headlines,” the play draws attention to his influence while also recognizing that it tends to go unnoticed. It thus counters the invisibility of Mark’s authority, which relies on what Peggy Phelan describes as the “real power in remaining unmarked” (Unmarked, 6). In addition, by requiring that Mark and Tara be constant witnesses to the action, the play implicates them in the stories they report and underscores the consequences of how they relay the conflict to the public. The news team’s coverage leads to an exacerbation of tensions and phone calls to the station denigrating both African Americans and Koreans. Undermining Suzie’s insistence that she is an objective outsider merely reporting on but not participating in what is happening in Brooklyn, the performance makes clear that the news team’s decisions tangibly affect outcomes, bringing more or less support for the boycott and even leading to violence.
Despite its interest in decrying the unacknowledged contingencies, constraints, and power dynamics that lead to biases and exclusions in the news, the play suggests a profound skepticism about the transformatory potential of simply rectifying omissions. As the performance progresses, Suzie becomes increasingly less certain that her investigation will uncover the truth or lead to a resolution. Early in the narrative, she declares, “That’s right. I believe in facts. Gather up enough facts, and they add up to a decision, an action, even a revelation. I’m not in this business for the glamour or the money” (417). By the end of the performance, however, she admits to Reverend Carter, “I still don’t know what happened in the store” (441). Suzie comes to realize that the accumulation of more information, an expressly quantitative endeavor to gather “enough” facts, is not necessarily efficacious or revelatory. The sincerity of her claim that she is only collecting facts with no selfish motives is also belied by choices she makes throughout the play that seem largely motivated by ambition or expedience. Yet even Suzie’s effort to cover both sides of the dispute comes to demonstrate only its intractability:
The Street. Suzie conducts interviews—Ping-pong style.
Black Chorus: We want Koreans to put their money in black-owned banks.
Suzie Seeto: Black-owned banks?
Korean Chorus: We did that. We got no service.
Suzie Seeto: You got no service?
Black Chorus: We want Koreans to hire blacks to work in their stores.
Suzie Seeto: Blacks working in Korean stores?
Korean Chorus: We did that. They stole from us.
Suzie Seeto: They stole from you?
Black Chorus: You paid them slave wages.
Grocer Mak: We paid them more than we paid ourselves. (436)
The “ping-pong style” of the interviews suggests a continuous and competitive exchange with no evident conclusion. Placing Suzie between the Black and Korean Choruses with the other characters as distant witnesses, the play dramatizes Freer’s observation that “these two relatively resource-poor groups are being asked to develop the solution to the inevitable conflict, a problem which does not begin with them.”36 The dialogue above emphasizes the irreconcilability of interests when the differential distribution of capital and opportunities imposes distinct limitations on how the disputing parties alone might remedy inequities.
Furthermore, Suzie’s attempt to reach a revelation or a reconciliation by fact-finding alone is complicated by the networks of embodied relationships through which understandings of “what happened” emerge, clash, and take effect. During the performance, characters echo the debates about the conduct of Korean American store owners that surfaced in media coverage of the Brooklyn boycott. Referring to Grocer Mak, Nurse Ruth Betty complains, “I’ve been putting money into that Korean man’s pocket for five years, and he can’t even look me in the eye when I open my purse. Once, I held out my five dollars, good honest money, and he refused to take it from my black hand. Do I look like I have a social disease?” (409). Ruth Betty thus denounces Mak’s avoidance of eye and physical contact, recalling the complaints of customers interviewed during and after the boycott and the uprising. In response, Mak reiterates that “cultural differences” have led to a misunderstanding of his behavior: “Plenty of respect. I don’t look in their eyes. I don’t touch them in false sign of friendly greeting. This is our way. This is the Korean way” (422). The financial transactions between Ruth Betty and Mak not only result in the transfer of money, but also generate a sense of racial difference: Ruth Betty becomes conscious of her “black hand” when Mak refuses to touch her while taking her money, and criticism of his ostensibly rude behavior forces Mak to insist on an essentially “Korean” way of showing respect.
In staging these disagreements over Grocer Mak’s manners, the play literally if somewhat ambivalently applauds the limited “solution” proffered in response to the 1990 boycott by programs aimed at retraining immigrant business owners. Although Mak is initially reluctant to attend sessions organized by his church to help “Korean businessmen . . . get along with American people” (442), he eventually agrees to “Americanize” the way he interacts with customers and practices his new approach on Suzie:
Willie Mak: Practice. Be nice. Make change.
Grocer Mak: [Gruffly.] Your change.
Soomi Mak: Put the change in her hand. Look her in eyeballs . . .
Grocer Mak: Please, thank you. Come again! [All applaud, including Black Chorus. Grocer Mak grumbles.] Only children and Chinese say, “Please, thank you.” Now buy something, or get out of my store. If you can’t help us, then leave, please, thank you. (443)
Willie and Soomi suggest that altering the way in which Grocer Mak makes change can actually “make change” in a broader sense by reshaping relationships between merchants and residents. The repetition of “change” and scripting of applause after Mak rehearses polite greetings mark his unenthusiastic effort as a significant accomplishment. Mak’s grouchy remarks immediately after the applause, however, attenuate the celebratory response and point to the limitations of such behavioral training. Disparaging the manners he agrees to adopt, Mak emphasizes the disparity between his understanding of such conduct and the perception of his customers. For Mak, “cultural difference” becomes a justification for leaving both of their assumptions and expectations unquestioned, and his willingness to change his comportment reflects only a desire to maintain his business.
However, Grocer Mak’s training in politesse is not the only model of trying on unfamiliar behaviors—and thus taking advantage of the mundane’s ambiguous relationship to the body—presented in the play. For Suzie, the central question to pursue in her investigation is what exactly happened in the store between Matilda Duvet and Grocer Mak. When she asks those involved to recount the incident, each Chorus presents her with a reenactment while decrying the other side’s version as false with the exclamation, “That’s not what happened at all” (415). The characters only ever act out what happened the day of the altercation, and what routinely happens in the store, as imaginative simulations. By having the Black and Korean Choruses perform both themselves and the “other” in these reenactments, the play situates their bodies emphatically within their respective retellings of the story—a sharp contrast to Suzie and Mark’s distanced reporting and editing. The performance therefore emphasizes the mediatedness of every attempt to represent these interactions, and never offers a definitive portrayal of what occurred. Yet these reenactments also seem to ask, if the respective choruses embodied the habitus of those with whom they are in conflict—if their performances were informed by the pressures shaping the behaviors of those they play—could they begin to “make change” in a substantive way?
Initially, each Chorus’s dramatization makes its biases evident through the sympathetic contextualization of their respective members’ behaviors. As the Black Chorus prepares for their reenactment, Reverend Carter tells Barber Brown, “You are Matilda Duvet. You are going home after a long day sweeping and cleaning for some uptown peoples” (413). As Matilda, Brown laments that her sister’s husband in Haiti has disappeared, a likely victim of the repressive regime’s secret police (the ton ton macoute or bogeymen). Carter and Brown thus help explain Matilda’s mood and conduct by underlining her difficult work and concern for family members in Haiti. In contrast, when Carter introduces himself as Grocer Mak, he assumes an exaggerated “Korean” accent and a stereotypical persona: “I Key Chun Mak, store owner. Two time alleady today, I catch shopliftahs. Stupid things—candy, potato chips, cig-a-lettes. How come dey never steal tofu?” (414). The Korean Chorus then interjects, “Makie was a civil servant in his own country. Now he is stacking cans of soup. Vegetable soup. Tomato soup. Miso soup. Cup of Soup” (414). Offering its own contextualization, the Korean Chorus echoes Carter’s enumeration of merchandise, but to capture the repetitive, manual tasks that engage Mak in his current occupation and to contrast it to his former career, rather than to set up a joke. Similarly, when Soomi plays Matilda in the Korean Chorus’s version of events and yells impatiently at Willie, the Black Chorus informs the audience, “Matilda has had a long day. She is worried about her sister; her husband has disappeared” (419). Each Chorus thus insists on augmenting the reenactments with accounts of the larger social circumstances that inform the characters’ conduct, even interrupting the other Chorus’s dramatization when it does not seem to provide all of the information relevant to telling the story.
Yet the apparently strict division between the Choruses is not always upheld, as Carter nevertheless draws attention to the petty crimes that trouble Mak. As the reenactments progress, these lines break down further. When Ruth Betty introduces herself in the role of Soomi, she echoes the Korean Chorus’s emphasis on the economic necessities and family hierarchies that determine how the Maks run the store: “I Soomi Mak and I am in high skoo. My uncle work me like a dog. I am behind da cash registah” (415). The exaggerated accent again implies caricature, but her acknowledgment of Soomi’s difficult situation undermines the absolute bifurcation of potentially extenuating information along racial lines. A similar juxtaposition of stereotypical and sympathetic impersonations is evident in the Korean Chorus’s simulation. As Soomi is about to enter the store as Matilda, she interrupts herself by noting, “No, first comes two customers. They are from a gang, you know. Lots of big muscles, and a bandana on his head. The other one, he wears big pants” (417). By prefacing Matilda’s arrival with the entrance of these two customers, Soomi initially seems to be drawing attention to the harassment and threat of violence with which the Maks must grapple. Playing one of the customers, Willie even displays a gun kept in his coat. Yet instead of directing it at Soomi, he asserts, “Yeah, I’m not gonna go down, that’s for sure. I’m gonna make it to my sixteenth birthday. Yeah. Brothers killing brothers, that’s bullshit” (418), and declares before leaving, “You can’t knock a man for trying to survive. Hear what I’m sayin’? [Beat.] Put that shit on my tab, Chinaman. Later” (418). Beginning with a stereotype of aggressive urban youths, Willie comes to underline the violence that burdens their everyday lives. He momentarily blurs the careful segregation of sympathies by the Choruses, even as he concludes by emphasizing the customer’s failure to pay.
Often explicitly superfluous or improbable, these continuous asides do not pretend to be realistic representations of what any particular character might know. Perhaps best capturing the spirit of Brechtian practices in the play, they emphasize a critical distance from the reenacted behaviors and the need to supplement these reenactments with an understanding of the material limitations and demands informing the conduct of those involved. In addition, although the characters offer similar explanations throughout the play, here they must embody the link between everyday behavior and sociohistorical context as the intersection of their own habitus and that of the character they are playing. In other words, contextual details that might work to justify or explain individual actions elsewhere in the drama are situated here in a complicated overlapping of bodies and behaviors across racial lines. The reenactments therefore highlight the materialization of sociohistorical pressures through the mundane, as well as the complex dynamic between bodies that determines the performativity of the habitus.
These cross-Chorus performances make visible the production of racial difference at the interface of the characters’ respective habits of sight and speech. Intricate relationships of identification and estrangement emerge in the space between actor and role, which characters variously emphasize or obscure. For example, when Reverend Carter, as Grocer Mak, watches Matilda and wonders, “Do I know her? Dey all rook arike to me. All those brack monkeys rook arike to me” (414), the evident affectedness of his performance stresses his distance from the role he plays. Yet this seemingly clear division between “actor” and “role” is inextricably tied to the murkier relationship between watching and being watched implied by Carter’s performance. The reenactment of Mak watching Matilda simultaneously racializes the grocer’s look as exemplifying Korean prejudice and racializes Matilda as indistinguishable from other black customers. The act of watching is thus both a racialized and a racializing gesture, establishing the Korean merchant as suspicious, racist, and greedy, and the black customer as delinquent, poor, and untrustworthy.
By assuming the role of Grocer Mak, Reverend Carter occupies the exact intersection of the dual implications of “looking alike”—appearing the same and seeing the same. His performance exemplifies the dynamic articulated in Du Boisian racial double consciousness, as both the racializing gaze of the other and its incorporation into one’s self-awareness are materialized in the uneasy relationship between actor and character. Despite the emphatic distancing of self and role, black and Korean, Carter’s impersonation of Mak underscores the mutual permeation of “passive” and “active” looks through which racial difference takes on a reality. The scene thus dramatizes the “exchange of gaze” elaborated in Phelan’s reading of Lacan: “Unable to reverse her own gaze (the eyes obstinately look only outside the self), the subject is forced to detour through the other to see herself.”37 While embodying the grocer, the reverend also sees himself as the object of the grocer’s scrutiny. Although “Mak” is ostensibly watching “Matilda,” his stated inability to differentiate between black customers implicates the reverend as well. While the actor presumably animates the character, the latter in this case (“Mak”) also infuses the corporeal awareness of the former (Carter), as the character’s “look” racializes the actor.
These exchanges of looks are moreover accompanied by contests of tongue and ear in which adopting exaggerated accents becomes a way of conveying the depicted individual’s otherness—in relation both to the one performing the accent and to normative American speech. Soomi as Matilda asks Willie, who plays himself, “How much are ze limes?” Willie responds by asking “What?” and then explains to Suzie, “I said. Just like that. The lady has very big accent” (418). As the scene continues, “Matilda” becomes frustrated by Willie’s inability to understand her and demands, “Why don’t you speak English? I’ve been here in dis countree tee years, and see how good my English is? Lime, lemon, how much?” (419). By emphasizing Matilda’s Haitian accent, Soomi and Willie, who are also nonnative English speakers, position themselves as less foreign by comparison. The redundancy of Willie’s comment that he spoke “Just like that” underlines the consistency of speech when he steps “out of character,” while the obvious disjuncture between Soomi’s usual way of speaking and her imitation of Matilda’s accent stresses their dissimilarity. Racial difference materializes in the seams between Soomi’s speech and her re-creation of Matilda’s voice.
Yet however ironic “Matilda’s” criticism of Willie’s English given the Korean Chorus’s caricature of her accent, the remark also posits incorrect hearing as a performance of foreignness and points to the constitution of difference in the exchange between verbal articulation and aural perception. “Matilda” interestingly denounces Willie’s inability to speak English, although their miscommunication is presumably due to his inability to hear her English correctly. This slippage, much like Carter’s performance of racializing “looks,” suggests that the line between hearing and speaking is never absolutely clear—even when reciprocal accusations of stunted linguistic assimilation buttress racial divisions. The reenactments thus convey what Michel de Certeau describes as the paradox of the frontier: “Created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? Neither.”38 The cross-Chorus reenactments bring to dramatic life the simultaneity of “conjunction and disjunction,” the materialization of racial difference at the moment of contact.
Separated by picket lines and mutual animosities, the Black and Korean Choruses are able to explain to Suzie what happened in the store only by representing those positioned as the enemy. As the reenactments described above demonstrate, one of the effects of embodying the other side of the dispute is to hold in suspense, on one body, the one who sees and the one who is seen, the one who speaks and the one who hears. In the course of the dramatizations, however, as the lines of sympathy between Choruses become less distinct, the interstices between actor and role—along which the performances materialize racial difference—begin to dissolve as well. In the climax of each simulation, physical and verbal outbursts mark a point when the imaginative reenactment of the incident briefly threatens to turn into an actual altercation. The Black Chorus’s reenactment in particular leads to a moment of confused sympathies that almost ends in violence. Suspecting “Matilda” (played by Barber Brown) of shoplifting, Reverend Carter confronts her as Grocer Mak:
Reverend Carter: “Let me see inside your bag.”
Barber Brown: “No, I tell you, no! Let go of my bag!” [They have a tug of war with the shopping bag.]
Reverend Carter: “I’m sick and tired of peepole who talkin’ too fast. I’m sick and tired of working so hard. Five A.M. to one A.M. [sic] I sick and tired of peepole yelring at me. Of peepole who do not understand even when I speakin’ Englrish. I sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Nurse Ruth Betty [as Soomi]: “Watch out! She’s going to lrun!”
Reverend Carter: “No, you don’t!” [The Reverend pulls back his fist to strike the Barber. The Korean Chorus gasps, as does Suzie.]
Barber Brown: Rev. Hey, Rev! You can be yourself now. Rev? Hey! Snap to. (415)
The characters’ reenactment of this event suggests that caricature and empathetic identification are not mutually exclusive, as they can coexist as well as shift from one to the other in the course of an impersonation. Playing Mak with a stereotypical accent, Carter nevertheless articulates and, by the end, embodies the economic and linguistic constraints on the grocer’s perception and conduct. The outcome of Carter’s brief identification with Mak, however, is not reconciliation, but a threat of violence, followed by the return of animosities between the Choruses. The scene thus questions the value of “walking in another’s shoes” as the reverend’s angry reaction might justify or explain the grocer’s alleged assault, but changes little. By so thoroughly inhabiting the pressures that shape Mak’s interactions with his customers, the reverend loses any sense of critique or self-reflexivity, and his reenactment comes to assume a fatalistic view of the conflict. He loses the explicit tension between “self” and “other” apparent earlier in the simulation, when his performance maintained a critical distance between actor and role, yet highlighted their multiple entanglements. Thus, the simulations stage the risks of complete emotional immersion and identification, the theatrical propensities Brecht so distrusted, even as they complicate the practice of holding actor and role in critical suspense by emphasizing the messy, unavoidable intersection of behaviors and perceptions.
Although the play ultimately offers an ambivalent depiction of these reenactments, they nevertheless provide an alternate model of recounting what happened that brings into relief the limitations of media reports of the boycott. As I argued above, Kimchee and Chitlins repeatedly underlines the various obfuscated pressures that shape the news and its distribution of public sympathies. In contrast to Suzie’s efforts to stand outside the story and accumulate facts “objectively,” the Choruses’ reenactments of the incident show their material implication in the stories they tell by requiring that they embody what they narrate.
The professional distance through which Suzie differentiates herself from the subjects of her reports finally collapses, however, when she tries to cover, at the height of tensions, the beating of a Vietnamese American boy by a group of African American children. She explains to Mark, “Standing there, watching those boys and that kid. I wasn’t hating them. No, no . . . I was too busy, too preoccupied with disassociating myself from that squirming, weak, yellow boy on the ground. Coolly, I hid behind my profession, thoroughly brainwashed by my complete-and-utter certainty that I could not and would not be hurt . . . because I was not like that kid. Those black boys with their baseball bat shattered my beautiful delusion once and forever. For if I wasn’t yellow, then what color did I think I was?” (448). The divide between reporter and subject initially helps Suzie distance herself from the boy being beaten. Yet her reluctant recognition that the racialization of his body extends to her own undermines these dichotomies. The apparent targeting of the boy because of his “race” compels her to identify with him even as she attempts to assume a deracialized, disembodied position. In watching the boy, she is in some ways watching herself, and this confusion of “looks” makes it difficult for her to maintain her disinterest. Suzie’s designation of both the boy and herself as “yellow” articulates a fraught identification with the abject that calls into question the possibility of choosing one’s color.
In its critique of Suzie’s journalistic detachment, the performance envisions a kind of reporting that might draw instead from the cross-Chorus reenactments. Specifically, it turns a theatrical device, the doubling of roles, into an imaginary journalistic device. According to the casting directions, the actors not only play one central character and serve as part of the Black or Korean Chorus, but also take on minor roles. One effect of this stipulation is that it troubles the apparent homogeneity of the Choruses. The play’s script specifies that Barber Brown, for example, should also play a Haitian man. The doubling of a long-time resident of Brooklyn who would identify as African American with an Afro-Caribbean immigrant suggests the tendency to conflate them as part of a monolithic black community, while stressing the variations in speech, manner, and conduct that speak to their different, if at points overlapping, histories. Within the Korean Chorus, the actor who plays Grocer Mak also plays a Pakistani news vendor. Reflecting on the boycott, he remarks, “I been selling newspapers on the corner for a long time. Black people don’t bother me. I am Pakistani. What is all the fuss? I guess black people don’t know, Korean people are like that. They are rude to everybody” (445). Even as the news vendor differentiates himself from Grocer Mak, he also expresses an awareness of their shared position as immigrant businessmen in the same neighborhood. His dissociation from Grocer Mak, like Suzie’s dissociation from the Vietnamese boy, seems inextricably intertwined with and compelled by a fear of being perceived as the same, a fear that is affirmed onstage by having the same actor play both roles, but is also undermined by his conspicuous shifts between characters.
Moving between multiple roles, the actors must make continual adjustments in how they manipulate their corporeal tendencies to match those of different characters. For example, Grocer Mak, Soomi, and Willie are all supposed to be immigrants from Korea with attendant linguistic preferences and limitations, yet these may or may not align with those of the actors, who are also asked to play other roles. Furthermore, what exactly their speech performs—the foreign or the familiar, a natural or an affected presentation, a caricature of “Asian” accents or an “authentic” reproduction of a particular dialect—depends on how the audience hears the dialogue, and whether or not they register a tension between the actor’s speech and that of the character. Yet the audience’s assumptions about the relationship between actor and character are also continuously destabilized by the role-doubling, which requires them to recalibrate their measurements of the gap between the performing body and enacted role. Finally, casting choices and audience conceptions of racial delineations at odds with those assumed by the script would complicate the effects and meanings generated by the role-doubling and the cross-Chorus reenactments. Whether Wong’s directions are followed or deliberately flouted, the play’s basic design forces productions to grapple with the challenge of presenting identities as settled one moment and variable the next, and to engage with the triangulated relationship between actor, character, and audience as a constantly moving target.
In contrast to the cross-Chorus reenactments, the script designates that most of the doubled roles do not traverse racial lines, broadly defined, with one exception: Wong stipulates that the actor who plays Suzie should also play Matilda. Despite Matilda’s evasion of the press, Suzie is finally able to interview her, and in this scene, the same actor gives the interview as Matilda and retrospectively narrates the interview as Suzie:
Suzie Seeto: (as Matilda, Haitian Creole accent) “Yes, I hope for a change. You see, I came from a poor, frightened, brutalized country. I came here of my own free will to make something of my life. I want to do it here in America. And this is the way I am greeted . . . poof, I’m a teef. Poof, I’m no good. [Laughs.] Poof, I’m a celebrity, and everybody’s wanting to know me business.” [As herself, Suzie.] And then Matilda offers me tea, and I try to get her back to my questions. But she was one of those people, you know. She wasn’t being dishonest, just difficult. I guess she didn’t think my questions were very relevant. [As Matilda.] “I have more important tings to worry my mind. Don’t you have more important tings?” (440)
By having Suzie reenact the interview as Matilda, the performance stresses the latter’s elusiveness and underlines the mediatedness of her public representation, as she appears and speaks only through the actor who otherwise plays a news reporter. Yet in contrast to Suzie’s other interviews, which the play dramatizes as dialogues, she recounts their conversation by assuming Matilda’s voice and habits, just as the Choruses share their respective versions of the controversial incident by playing different characters. Suzie thus relinquishes the distanced objectivity of the journalist and draws attention to how she hears and sees Matilda in her “report.” In other words, by embodying Matilda, Suzie implicates her own habits of perception and behavior in her representation, risking an inevitable gap in speech and manners as she attempts to re-create Matilda’s demeanor or her Haitian Creole accent.39
Suzie’s reenactment of Matilda’s responses to her questions therefore offers a model of reporting on the boycott that counters the news practices critiqued in the play. While Mark and Tara watch the conflict from a distance, Suzie makes her involvement increasingly evident, and her interview with Matilda dramatizes the attenuation of her professional disengagement through her embodiment of Matilda’s words. Blurring the distinctions between monologue and dialogue, past and present, actor and character, the interview between Suzie and Matilda brings together the conventions of the Choruses’ reenactments (in which characters play one another) with those of the play’s broader role-doubling (in which an actor plays multiple characters). Although the script gives a slight primacy to the role of Suzie (who plays both Matilda and “herself”), it does not make it entirely clear whether the audience should see the performance as the playing of two distinct characters (akin to the role-doubling) or the imitation of one character by another (akin to the reenactments). Furthermore, in contrast to other instances when actors and characters take on different roles, Suzie’s interview with Matilda is characterized by fluid, rapid shifts between the two characters. The performance thus dwells here on the ambiguous, giving neither actor nor audience a clear sense of how to distribute the lines between actor and character, reporter and subject, black and Asian.
Together, the play’s temporal and spatial manipulations, doubling of roles, and cross-racial reenactments capture the complex intersection of embodied histories and uneven social relations that shape interracial conflicts and their public narration. The behavioral and perceptual habits of customers and merchants materialize specific imperatives and limits—social, historical, economic—reflecting the impact of distinct patterns of immigration, segregation, and racialization. In these encounters, interactions between habitus dynamically and reciprocally realize difference and identity. Yet the presumed temporal and spatial discreteness of bodies masks these exchanges, while the hypervisibility of minority merchants and customers obfuscates the influence of institutions and peoples less visibly implicated in these conflicts. This division of those who encounter one another in the boycotted stores from those who profit from their transactions from afar, or those who seem merely to watch or report on their disputes, limits the prospects of “making change” by enabling the disavowal of shared interest and responsibility. Kimchee and Chitlins takes advantage of the possibilities of theatrical performance to evoke unrecognized relationships and to trouble facile explanations of the boycott as the result of “cultural differences.”
At the conclusion of the play, Suzie ambivalently accepts a promotion made possible by her coverage of the boycott while Grocer Mak closes his store. Envisioning an alternate ending in which Mak and Brown become friends, Suzie comments on the bleak conclusion, “Just goes to show, the best stories are . . . the best stories are invented” (449). Although Kimchee and Chitlins self-consciously resists offering any solutions or resolutions, the imaginative reenactments it stages suggest ways of materializing connections that otherwise get erased in the lines drawn between bodies. Despite the risks of crossing those lines—the potential for caricature, appropriation, or exacerbated tensions—such performances may also bring to light their permeability, mutual constitution, and prospective reconfigurations.
In Wong’s adamantly hyperbolic play, Suzie’s interview with Matilda straddles fantasy and reality through the manipulation of theatrical devices, and the scene remains a hypothetical experiment in unconventional reportage. For her series On the Road: A Search for American Character, Anna Deavere Smith puts into practice the kind of theatricalized “reporting” imagined in Kimchee and Chitlins by Suzie’s conversation with Matilda. In her performances, Smith reenacts people whom she has previously interviewed, closely re-creating their speech and behaviors. After the Los Angeles riots, the Mark Taper Forum, which also held a reading of Kimchee and Chitlins in May 1992, commissioned Smith to create a performance piece similar to Fires in the Mirror (1992), her treatment of interracial tensions in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 opened in Los Angeles in June 1993, just over a year after the uprising.
Drawing from interviews with a range of subjects, from government officials and scholars to Los Angeles store owners and residents, Smith’s “documentary theater” offers an alternative to the coverage provided by the mainstream media. Like Suzie’s reenactment of her interview with Matilda, Smith’s performance sits at the interface between the habitus of the actor and that of the character, and highlights the negotiations between speaking and hearing, and acting and seeing that become apparent in efforts to embody others. Yet if Kimchee and Chitlins repeatedly reminds the audience of its comic, invented elements, Twilight tempts the audience to refer continuously to the real in its portrayal of Smith’s interviewees, especially those who are well-known public figures. Smith’s work shares many characteristics with the solo performances of Danny Hoch and Sarah Jones, who also move between a diverse set of characters. Smith, however, emphasizes her interview process and her emulation of real individuals, whereas Hoch and Jones stress that they take inspiration from, rather than directly imitate, people whom they encounter. This explicit if complex attachment to the nonfictive has brought particular scrutiny on Smith’s ability—or inability—to simulate her subjects accurately. The incongruities that emerge in Smith’s attempts to capture her interviewees’ mannerisms and accents, however, are precisely what make palpable both the historical and institutional pressures within which the mundane develops and the intersection of behavioral and perceptual tendencies through which identities take on substance and meaning.
Along with other performances in On the Road, Twilight has elicited divergent responses from audiences and critics, who variously characterize Smith’s work as humanistic, poststructuralist, Brechtian, utopian, and/or stereotypical. The diversity of reactions is exemplified in scholarly analyses like that of Tania Modleski, who argues that critics who denounce the performances as caricature miss the “dynamism of Smith’s portrayals,”40 but admits that Smith’s representation of white women made her feel uncomfortable.41 Such conflicted evaluations reflect the challenge of neatly defining a performance that experiments with accepted conventions of representation and insists that attention be paid to the multiple layers of archive and repertoire that it brings together—the interview between Smith and her subject, the transcription of their conversation, the process by which she gets into character, the actual performance, audience reaction to the show, and so on.
The struggle to understand Smith’s performances as journalistic or theatrical, modernist or postmodernist, subversive or stereotypical, which leaves critics embracing a “neither” and “both” approach to her work, seems particularly fitting given her expressed interest in capturing the “American character . . . alive inside of syntactical breaks.”42 In the introduction to the published version of Fires in the Mirror, Smith explains, “The break from the pattern is where character lives, and where dialogue, ironically begins, in the uh, in the pause, in the thought as captured for the first time in a moment of speech, rather than in the rehearsed, the proven.”43 The “uhs” and “ums” of critics and spectators trying to comprehend her performances in terms of an existing vocabulary similarly reflect an effort to articulate what has yet been codified. Positioned in the pause, Smith’s performances are articulations that simultaneously verbalize and connect,44 and not simply pluralistic or additive projects of making more bodies visible and heard (a reading of her work that has been accompanied by both praise and criticism).45 Instead, her performances make legible revealing associations and tensions between the everyday and the historical, and between the corporeal and the discursive through the complex relationships they instantiate between reporter and subject, and actor and audience. At the crux of these performances is Smith’s reenactment of the mundane, her careful re-creation of her subject/character’s habits of behavior and speech.
In her performances, Smith emulates how her interview subjects speak, and not just what they say. She recounts the influence of her grandfather’s assertion that “if you say a word often enough it becomes you,”46 which inspired her to develop a technique of acting that moves away from the “self-oriented method” of psychological realism. Smith explains, “If we were to inhabit the speech pattern of another, and walk in the speech of another, we could find the individuality of the other and experience that individuality viscerally. I became increasingly convinced that the activity of reenactment could tell us as much, if not more, about another individual than the process of learning about the other by using the self as a frame of reference.”47 Stressing the limitations of dominant acting practices that encourage using the self to create the character, Smith argues for an “other-based” approach anchored in a distinctly corporeal understanding of the other. As she interviews her subjects, she notes their physical gestures as well as their verbal responses and prepares for her performances by frequently listening to and replicating their speech and comportment—or, by saying their words so often they become her. For Smith, speaking as the other does not mean psychologically interpreting the other through one’s own experiences, but physically inhabiting or “walking” in their speech by re-creating the bodily habits and vocal inflections that carry their words.
Smith’s performances have attracted critical interest for breaking with modern, “humanist” approaches to acting and their concomitant assumptions about identity. Referring in particular to Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender, Debby Thompson argues, “While post-structuralist models of identity—notions of identity as ‘performative’—have become almost dogma in current literary theory, acting practice in the U.S. has been slow to reflect this shift in models of identity, and is still very much based in liberal humanism.”48 Thompson elaborates that in contrast to a humanist approach that would assume a “you” preceding the words, Smith’s method, as inspired by her grandfather, suggests that “if words become ‘you,’ then your ‘you-ness,’ your very self-hood, is made up of your interaction with words. Or, turned around, you become you by saying words.”49 Charles Lyons and James Lyons similarly observe that Smith’s practices move away from prevailing “modernist” approaches derived from the Stanislavski method and influenced by Freudian psychology, which encourage “a spatial image of character that sees the outside of a dramatic figure—body, gesture, voice, overt action—as the refracted manifestation of an interior dynamic that must be discovered by the actor and revealed in performance as the energy that drives speech and action.”50 As opposed to this “inside-out” understanding of the subject, the reenactment of characters through the reiteration of their voices and behaviors underlines their interpellation as subjects within relations of power and inequity. Lyons and Lyons contend that in Smith’s work, “the important alignment is between the actor and the conditions—the socio-economic dynamics—that make the other’s statements necessary or, rather, the systems of power that position the speaker as the figure who can make those statements.”51 The character’s speech, then, “represents the self-constitution of the speaker as a subject positioned by the degree of power or powerlessness they hold.”52 Lyons and Lyons emphasize that Smith’s acting strategy conceives of the subject as a historical and institutional formation. The words her characters speak—and the manner in which they speak—not only manifest the particular limits and possibilities that inhere in their social position, but also materialize them as subjects (or, as Thompson describes, they become an “I” or “you” through such discursive and corporeal reiterations).
Both of these analyses associate Smith’s work with that of Brecht, whose theories encourage acting practices that articulate a character’s relationship to her or his socioeconomic conditions. The concept of the gestus is key to this project. Brecht explicates, “The realm of attitudes adopted by the characters towards one another is what we call the realm of gest. Physical attitude, tone of voice and facial expression are all determined by a social gest: the characters are cursing, flattering, instructing one another, and so on.”53 Expressed corporeally, the social gest is a position taken toward other characters that reflects their relationships to one another and to social conditions: “The social gest is the gest relevant to society, the gest that allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances.”54 Using Bourdieu’s terms, we might say that these theatrical enactments of social gest crystallize the habitus and frame it critically: the Brechtian actor draws attention to conventional behaviors that, when staged, come to typify the social relations that they usually embody implicitly. In their examinations of Smith’s performances, Lyons, Lyons, and Thompson propose that her practices similarly reject the tendency of dominant acting methods to naturalize characters’ actions and speech as expressions of an essential interiority, and instead accentuate the sociohistorical conditions that shape them.55 Thus, Smith’s performances make visible the relationship between an interview subject and a broader social context through specific configurations of body and voice that point out instead of in.
By asking her subjects to speak on the uprising, Smith indeed encourages them to consider issues of power and inequity raised by the conflict. By playing each of the characters herself and limiting her portrayals to short excerpts from her interviews, Smith highlights the idiosyncrasies of each speaker and the differences among them, instead of creating a sense of depth and coherence. In particular, she accentuates distinctive verbal and bodily tendencies to convey each character’s relationship to the issues that they discuss.56 These articulations of the sociohistorical through the mundane are particularly vivid in the moments of incongruity, the “breaks” not only in syntax, but also in comportment and between speech and comportment.
In Smith’s portrayal of artist Rudy Salas,57 an upright posture and raised head initially accompany his account of multiple experiences with police brutality. A carriage suggestive of masculine pride, however, is soon replaced by the thrust of his arms upward when he recalls advising his children to replicate the gesture for police officers to indicate that they are not armed. He then begins to slump in his seat and later struggles to speak while asking his wife Margaret about her encounter with the police: “Didn’t they, / Margaret, / insult [our son] one time and they pulled you over . . . / the Alhambra cops, they pulled you over / and, aww, man . . . / My enemy” (7). The shift from a pose of defiance to one of submission and the subsequent inability to verbalize his frustration situate Salas at the intersection of multiple axes of power and powerlessness. Earlier in the interview, Salas explains that he enjoys seeing expressions of fear on white people when they encounter minorities: “It’s a physical thing, / it’s a mental, mental thing that they’re [white people] physically afraid [of minorities]. / I, I can still see it, / I can still see it, / and, and, / and, uh-uh, / I love to see it” (5). Salas’s remarks suggest that the visible trepidation of white people puts him in a position of power: their perception of minorities and his perception of their fear positions him as the one with the potential to intimidate. In contrast, raising his hands when confronted by the police demonstrates a reluctant compliance to authority and an expectation of mistreatment, a social gest that highlights the differential policing of racialized bodies. Thus, the racialization of Salas as a physical threat gives him a sense of power, yet it also makes him more susceptible to violence from those with greater institutional authority.
Smith emphasizes a similar disjuncture between assertions of masculine confidence and concurrent expressions of powerlessness in her depiction of Walter Park, a Korean American store owner shot during the uprising. In the published script, Smith prefaces his interview responses with an unusually full description of the subject:
Mr. Park speaks in the rhythm of a person who has full authority and ease, and a person who has all of the facts exactly straight. When he begins talking, his wife and son shake their heads to let me know that he doesn’t know the answer to the question. He is sitting with his arms crossed and legs crossed, also in an easy but confident and authoritative position. From his body position and his rhythm you would think this was the most reasonable, sound response possible. It is, of course, emotionally sound, but there is a gap between the question and the answer. He is heavily sedated, and has been since he was shot. (142–43)
Smith stresses a gap between Park’s physical comportment and manner of speaking, which suggest “authority and ease,” and the content of his responses, which reflects the damage inflicted by what his stepson describes as an “execution-style” shot to the head. Park’s disorientation becomes evident as he recounts his surprise at being informed that he had been hospitalized: “and one guy happened to tell me / ‘Why you wanna go Korea / for? / You just came out of / hospital.’ / You know, / that, / that makes me wonder too. So I came home and / I told her [his wife] about it / and / she didn’t say nothing” (144). Here, the confusion expressed in his words belies the certainty with which he speaks them, and this inconsistency between his corporeal habits and verbal responses illuminates the seemingly divergent but inseparable positions he occupies as a successful businessman and a bewildered victim of violence stemming from economic and racial tensions.
In contrast to Salas and Park, whose postures of authority are set in tension with physical and verbal expressions of helplessness, Smith’s performance of Sergeant Charles Duke, a “use-of-force expert” for the Los Angeles Police Department, suggests an eerily steady and largely seamless, if at times emphatic, discussion of physical force. A witness for the defense in the trial of the four officers who beat King, Duke explains, “If we had upper-body-control holds / involved in this, / this tape woulda never been on, / this incident woulda lasted about fifteen seconds. / The reason that we lost upper-body-control holds . . . / because we had something like seventeen to twenty deaths in a period of about 1975–76 to 1982” (62). In Smith’s re-creation of Duke’s response, he speaks calmly and forcefully with an easy confidence, which would seem unremarkable, were it not for the gravity of his statements. In other words, what is most notable about Duke is his apparent lack of discomfort or hesitation as he recounts the debates about using choke holds and batons to restrain people. His institutional authority is incarnated in his composed demeanor and speech, which in turn naturalizes his authority. Duke exemplifies what then-district attorney Gil Garcetti, in another interview with Smith, describes as the “magic” that seems to surround police officers, particularly in courtrooms:
I mean, if a cop, for example, comes in with a raid jacket
and guns bulging out
he’ll wipe himself out very quickly,
because he’ll look like he’s a cowboy.
But if you have a man coming in
or a woman coming in—
you know, professionally dressed,
polite
with everyone—
the magic
is there
and it’s a . . .
it’s an aura,
that is conveyed to the jury: “I am telling the truth
and I’m here to help you,
to protect you,” and they want to believe that . . . (76)
According to Garcetti, the “magic” that authorizes police officers’ testimony comes not from the ostentatious display of power, the “raid jacket / and guns bulging out,” but from a polite manner that seems to affirm the truth of their words and the naturalness of their actions. Garcetti’s remarks echo Bourdieu’s analysis: “The purely social and quasi-magical process of socialization, which is inaugurated by the act of marking that institutes an individual as an eldest son, an heir, a successor, a Christian, or simply as a man (as opposed to a woman), with all the corresponding privileges and obligations, and which is prolonged, strengthened and confirmed by social treatments that tend to transform instituted difference into natural distinction, produces quite real effects, durably inscribed in the body and in belief.”58 To the extent that Smith’s performance of Duke is remarkable for being so unremarkable, she captures and conveys some of the “magic” that makes certain identities and forms of authority seem natural, credible, and tangible. And as Garcetti and Bourdieu emphasize, this “quasi-magical process” has significant consequences.
Smith’s reenactments of Duke and Garcetti suggest an effort to challenge the apparent soundness of Duke’s authority through meaningful juxtapositions—of different interviews, of statements within an interview, and of words and behaviors. Wong similarly uses the flexibility of the stage in Kimchee and Chitlins to draw attention to Mark’s unrecognized implication in the boycott. The format of Smith’s performances, however, also lends them their own authoritative neutrality. Noting that she does not offer any added exposition on the interviews that she re-creates, Lyons and Lyons argue, “These performances are polyphonic, both in the sense of representing multiple voices and in their refusal to synthesize differences in any intervening personal statement, any authorial commentary.”59 They contend that Smith allows her many interviewees to speak through her without interjecting her own perspective. Yet as other critics have noted, the absence of explicit commentary from Smith does not mean that her performances are free from other forms of editorializing.60 Dorinne Kondo, for example, warns against missing “the degree to which there is a point of view expressed through the questions asked in the interviews, the selection and arrangement of material, the performance, and the production itself—lighting, sets, music, costumes, placement on the stage.”61 Kondo thus points to the kind of obscured editorial decisions critiqued in Kimchee and Chitlins as lending a false sense of objectivity to the news.
Smith’s performances, however, do make explicit her corporeal mediation of the interviews. Even if Smith does not vacillate between “herself” and her “character” (thus explicitly foregrounding her choices as an interviewer, editor, and performer), her habitus is always in tension with that of the subject whom she plays, and the varying degrees of friction that become evident in the dramatizations call attention to her active struggle to manifest and bridge the gaps between the two. Neither a distanced report of her interviews nor an exact replication of them, Smith’s reenactments repeatedly implicate her body in her representations of others. Her performances therefore do not simply materialize what she sees and hears, but how she sees and hears, and thus what she is able or unable to see, able or unable to hear, given her own social position and habits of body and perception. Recounting her efforts to develop an “other-oriented” method of acting, Smith reflects, “If I have an inhibition about acting like a man, it may also point to an inhibition I have about seeing a man or hearing a man. To develop a voice one must develop an ear. To complete an action, one must have a clear vision.”62 To the extent that Smith’s dual roles as interviewer and interviewee are legible in her reenactments, her performances are not simply representations of the other, but expressions of how she sees and hears the other. For example, when Rodney King’s aunt Angela King asks Smith in the middle of their interview, “You understand what I’m sayin’ now? / You do?” (57), the reenactment of this moment explicitly positions Smith as both the observed and the observer, the speaker and the listener. Doubly mediated by her perception of individuals during these interviews and her subsequent embodiment of those perceptions, Smith’s performances materialize the other at the intersection of voice and ear, action and vision.
When Smith reenacts Salas, Park, or Duke, her observations of these individuals are embodied in the choices she makes regarding intonation, gesture, posture, and so on. Even if these choices were consistently geared toward replicating her interviewee as accurately as possible, the act of hearing or seeing is already selective, already informed by the social and historical conditioning of her perceptions. As Phelan notes, “Taking the visual world in is a process of loss: learning to see is training in careful blindness. To apprehend and recognize the visible is to eliminate as well as absorb visual data.”63 The steady, unruffled quality of Duke’s comportment, in contrast to Salas’s assertive posture, speaks as much to what Smith sees or does not see, as it does to the men’s actual attitudes. Yet to the extent that these are inseparable in the actual performances, Smith stages the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of ever making an absolute distinction. While the convergence of “actor” and “character” in her performances highlights the materialization of identity at their intersection, the disjuncture between them, which becomes more and less apparent at different points of the performance, reveals the distinct conditions that have shaped their respective bodies.
This disjuncture becomes especially evident in Smith’s attempts to replicate accents and non-English languages. However often she repeats and mimics the speech of others, her tongue and ear cannot be reshaped to conform to an entirely different linguistic history. Her inability to capture the speech of nonnative English speakers with complete accuracy, however, has drawn criticism as an example of her performances’ uncomfortable proximity to stereotypes. Smith recalls that Kondo, as a dramaturg for Twilight, informed her that some Asian Americans were disappointed with the performance because it did not “represent them adequately or with enough complexity.”64 While teaching Twilight, Sandra Kumamoto observed that her students were uneasy with Smith’s depiction of Korean American characters. She relates their concern that in Smith’s performance of Young-Soon Han, a liquor store owner who lost her business during the uprising, she “not only risks reifying cultural stereotypes, but, in imitating the voice of an immigrant, she risks caricaturing and offending Asian immigrants who often feel marginalized precisely because of their speech.”65 Smith’s failure to close the gap between her speech and that of her characters threatens to turn her reenactments into performances of racial stereotypes.
The capacity for hearing and emulating another’s speech, however, is already shaped by an existing history of caricaturing certain ways of speaking. In other words, these responses to Smith’s reenactments implicate her audience’s habits of hearing and speaking as much as her own. Caricature is no more an inherent feature of Smith’s work than is utopian pluralism or poststructuralist performativity; instead, it emerges in relation to specific, historically situated audiences. I am not suggesting a radical relativity in which evaluations of representations as offensive are meaningless, but rather arguing for a consideration of the complex diachronic and synchronic relationships between bodies that inform such assessments. Describing the unsettling experience of watching Smith’s performances, Modleski observes, “Just when people are presented as most like themselves, they suddenly seem like ‘types,’ our laughter as suddenly seems to border on ridicule, and we find ourselves confronting our own racism.”66 Modleski’s account locates the moment when character becomes type between Smith’s presentation and the audience’s laughter, and her phrasing leaves ambiguous whether the presentation or the laughter is responsible for the shift to racial caricature. It accordingly situates the performance of racism at the point of contact between reenactment and reception. In setting the mannerisms of actor and character in tension, Smith elicits physical as well as verbal reactions (of pleasure, discomfort, anger, and ambivalence) from the audience that manifest the viewer’s own social gest—a socially significant attitude that, in this case, points to the entrenched racialization of perception.
If theatrical performance in its most basic form is a meeting of audience and actor mediated through character, character in Smith’s performances is an unstable center that amalgamates and refracts the interviewee’s presentation of self before Smith, Smith’s observation of the interviewee, her enactment of these observations, and the audience’s interactions with her enactment. While it is possible to conceive of theatrical character more generally in similar terms, Smith simultaneously raises the stakes of distinguishing between the layers that constitute her performance and frustrates attempts to make such distinctions. In works such as Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, she delves into conflicts between differently racialized communities through a performance process that cannot help but provoke questions of authenticity and stereotyping. As her characters try to navigate the complexities of these conflicts, Smith’s enactment of their gestures and accents implicates interviewee, actor, and audience in this project through the discomforts of the body: the body trying to articulate the contradictions of racialized inequity, the body trying to conform to another’s habits of speaking and behaving, the body trying to decide when laughter is appropriate. Smith’s performances draw all involved into a tight knot where, as in Kimchee and Chitlins, seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard become entangled processes.
Although the thematic concerns of Twilight invite the interview subjects and audience members to reflect on racial issues, if racial stereotyping also seems to happen in the performance, where it happens is not always clear. Today, cross-racial performances in the theater usually come with an explanation, such as a commitment to multicultural or color-blind casting, an intention to forward a social critique, or an acquiescence (sincere or not) to the demands of staging a production.67 These explanations offer audiences a guideline for how to see (or how not to see) any apparent racial misalignments between character and actor, and thus provide some relief from having to maneuver these difficult gaps. For example, a white actor playing the biracial Engineer in Miss Saigon may cause controversy outside the theater, but spectators are asked to accept (with a little help of makeup) the character’s racial identifications over those of the actor. By contrast, Smith’s performances leave her and her audiences, like her characters, in the break between established patterns, caught between intimacy and distance, the promise of documentary faithfulness and the specter of racial caricature.
Smith’s depiction of Young-Soon Han, as Kumamoto notes, has prompted especially uncomfortable responses, and I turn to this performance as a final example of how embodying the mundane of others might illuminate the reciprocal and interstitial constitution of difference. In her interview with Smith, Han stresses that while Korean American business owners remain devastated by damages incurred during the uprising, the African American community received the justice they sought with the guilty verdicts in the civil trials of the police officers. She explains, “Then a couple of months ago / I really realized that / Korean immigrants were left out / from this / society and we were nothing. / What is our right? / Is it because we are Korean? / Is it because we have no politicians? / Is it because we don’t / speak good English? / Why? / Why do we have to be left out? / (She is hitting her hand on the coffee table)” (245). Emphasizing her inability to understand why Korean Americans remain marginalized, Han lists various possible explanations: racism, lack of representation, and linguistic difficulties. Through this seemingly random juxtaposition, Han expresses a suspicion that her habits of speech are linked not only to her racialization, but also to her prospect of being heard politically. She hints that having a specific kind of voice determines whether one has a voice at all. In contrast to the cool expositions of Duke and others interviewed by Smith, Han’s ardent, drum-like banging during the interview conveys the frustrations of those whose improper speech positions them outside of proper citizenship.
Han’s remark about linguistic capacity, however, stands out not only because of its specificity and ostensible triviality in comparison to being Korean or not having representative politicians, but also because of the particular attention that Smith received for her performance of Han’s speech. As repeated by Smith, the question, “Is it because we don’t speak good English?” may solicit assessments of Han’s mastery of the language, but only as refracted through Smith’s reenactment. Smith’s performance consequently deflects the question from what it means to speak an “imperfect” or accented English, to what it means to imitate that speech imperfectly.
Yet the expectation that Smith either erase the inflections of Han’s speech or replicate them with complete accuracy assumes the desirability—and the possibility—of assimilating others without grappling with the physical imprints of their formative histories. Replacing Smith’s imperfect rendering of Han’s speech with “normative” English would effectively obscure the demands placed on Han’s body and behavior by migration, racialization, and the pressures of assimilation, as well as her struggle to articulate the relationship between the minor inflections of her voice and larger socioeconomic circumstances. On the other hand, the insistence that Smith provide an exact imitation of Han demands an implausible suturing of the fissures in speech and comportment that reflect the disparate social positions of Smith, Han, and, additionally, the audience. Even if Smith could mimic Han’s accent with complete accuracy, such an imitation would not guarantee that the audience would hear the speech as authentic. Just as Smith’s efforts to bridge “self” and “other” through her acting practice make tangible their distinct and mutual constitutions, uncomfortable “breaks” in the audience’s engagement with her reenactments manifest the fraught convergence of various perceptual and bodily tendencies. My point, however, is not that criticism of Smith’s work as stereotypical is erroneous. Instead, like an interviewee’s frustrated stammering or Smith’s attempt to replicate it, visceral responses of amusement, anger, discomfort, or pity are iterations of the historical and social networks that appear—and disappear—at the interface of bodies.
In the quotation from Allen Cooper with which I began the chapter, he decries the media’s sensationalistic portrayal of the King and Denny beatings for further obfuscating the everyday violence with which residents of inner-city neighborhoods must live. He asserts, “You got to live here to express this point, you got to live / here to see what’s goin’ on. / You gotta look at history, baby, / you gotta look at history” (101). For Cooper, living in these neighborhoods is inextricably tied to looking at history: the history being made in Los Angeles, as well as the history that prompted the uprising. He suggests that those who watched the Los Angeles riots from a distance cannot fully comprehend the extent to which the uprising was not an exceptional outburst, a spectacular “soap opera” to appall viewers, but the manifestation of everyday tensions and entrenched inequities.
In his interview with Smith, Reginald Denny affirms Cooper’s sense of a disjuncture between those for whom the uprising was inseparable from the mundane, and those for whom it ostensibly bore no immediate relation to their daily existence: “I mean, / does anyone know / what a riot looks like? / I mean, I’m sure they do now. / I didn’t have a clue of what one looked like / and / I didn’t know that the verdict had come down. / I didn’t pay any attention / to that, / because that / was somebody else’s problem / I guess I thought / at the time. / It didn’t have anything to do with me” (104). Denny acknowledges that he saw the King beating and trial as irrelevant to his life, as “somebody else’s problem,” until he suddenly found himself in the middle of a battleground. In her interview, Congresswoman Maxine Waters similarly characterizes the government as disconnected from the conditions that led to the uprising: “I mean, our leadership / is so far removed / from what really goes on in the world / they, um, / it’s not enough to say they’re insensitive / or they don’t care. / They really / don’t / know. / I mean, they really don’t see it, / they really don’t understand it, / they really don’t see their lives in / relationship to / solving these kinds of problems” (164). Waters’s disconcerting observation suggests a deep-rooted obstacle to making policy changes that might effectively address the untenable conditions that led to the uprising. Both she and Denny stress a correlation between the possibilities of one’s vision—of knowing “what a riot looks like” or seeing “what really goes on in the world”—and one’s sense of connectedness to and responsibility for particular circumstances and events.
Twilight and Kimchee and Chitlins stage these profound chasms between those separated by geography, class, race, gender, and institutional position—divisions that shape and are shaped by everyday behaviors and habits of interaction. Both performances strive to articulate these divides, to suggest intricate and overlooked networks of influence by using theatrical conventions to cross established borders. In some productions of Twilight, Smith also explored the possibility of bringing her disparate characters into conversation by adding an imaginary dinner scene. Inspired by a discussion with chef Alice Waters, Smith explained, “I now have a scene with a group of people sitting around a dinner table, and I make the allusion that they are talking to each other. I put six characters in a fictitious setting and have them talking, with food as a meeting place—a civilized thing. Something I’ve always been interested in is finding ways to bring unlikely people together.”68 This dinner table scene, which is not included in either the published or the televised version, is the only segment of Twilight that is explicitly fictitious, although it is based on her interviews. It is also perhaps its most utopian moment, as Smith does not merely juxtapose diverse voices, but imagines them speaking to one another in a congenial, “civilized” context.
Challenging Suzie’s observation at the end of Kimchee and Chitlins that “the best stories are invented” (449), Smith turned this hypothetical meeting into an actuality during the production of the film version of Twilight several years after the uprising. The film, which combines Smith’s solo performances, videos from the uprising, and standard documentary-style (i.e., un-reenacted) interviews, also includes footage of a meal attended by, among others, Smith, former police commissioner Daryl Gates, academic Elaine Kim, journalist Ruben Martinez, and Paul Parker, chairperson of the Free the L.A. Four Defense Committee, which advocated on behalf of Denny’s accused attackers. In the segment shown in the film, Parker begins to explain that unlike a revolution (his preferred term for the Los Angeles uprising), riots have “no political overtone.” Gates then interrupts by asking if Parker himself participated in the uprising, and rather sarcastically inquires, “Do you steal when you’re in a revolution?” As the two argue, Smith proposes that even as the diners talk, they should all “make sure [they’re] listening” as well. Smith here echoes a recommendation that she makes in the introduction to Fires in the Mirror, where she suggests that one way to make the tensions between those in the center and those on the margins productive is to listen.69 Yet if, as both Twilight and Kimchee and Chitlins emphasize, listening and looking do not involve just the reception of another’s words and actions, but the intersection of distinct perceptual and bodily proclivities, Gates and Parker’s capacities for hearing and seeing each other are already severely constrained and, to an extent, predetermined. Even as they face each other across a table, their bickering suggests that they lack a common vocabulary—discursive and corporeal—with which to turn physical proximity into an understanding of how their “profoundly different conditions of existence,”70 as Bourdieu puts it, are inextricably linked.
These are, of course, exactly the divides that Smith attempts to overcome for herself through her acting process. By “walk[ing] in the speech of another,” by repeatedly simulating verbal and physical expressions, she listens to the other by speaking as the other, and sees the other by inhabiting her or his behaviors. Her suggestion, then, that the individuals she brought together for a meal simply listen to one another seems strangely incomplete. Instead, the kind of listening that she may have hoped to generate is more evident in the hushed theaters where she gives her performances. Watching Smith at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Let Me Down Easy, her recent work on illness, death, and health care, I found myself a captive listener, riveted by the stories she told by intertwining her voice and body with those of her characters. I wondered, however, whether I would listen as carefully if I encountered her subjects outside the theater. Would I be patient enough to wait, like Smith, for interviews that must certainly be at times dull, rambling, confused, or even distasteful to reach their moments of shattering insight, eloquence, and poetry? In her analysis of Twilight, Cherise Smith points out that by reenacting interview subjects as they are speaking to her, she positions viewers in her place and compels them to identify with her.71 Furthermore, the larger dynamics of the performance—a gifted storyteller speaking to an engrossed audience in a formal theater space—encourage viewers to listen as attentively as Smith must have to her subjects/characters. Set in relation to—not in contrast with—her performances, Smith’s request that those present at the contentious meal listen to one another gestures toward the different forms of listening that are possible over dinner, in the theater, and through such frequent repetitions of another’s words that they become you.
Smith’s process of learning how to “walk in the speech of another” suggests the possibilities of putting into practice the kind of reenactments imagined by Kimchee and Chitlins’s cross-Chorus dramatizations, where the disputing characters enact others while simulating a controversial event. The explicit fictitiousness of Wong’s play allows it to set these cross-racial performances next to Suzie’s interview with Matilda (the scene most reminiscent of Smith’s On the Road performances) and her customary news reports. It thus models and compares three different attempts to mediate the conflict, drawing out their respective limitations as well as the potential value of mixing theatrical and journalistic forms. Yet even as Wong’s drama asks what difference it might make if those involved in the boycott could only narrate and understand what happened by inhabiting conflicting social positions, it stops short of envisioning that such performances might make substantial change. Instead, it highlights the apparent irreconcilability of perspectives informed by opposing material exigencies, as well as the difficulty of manifesting connections to distanced witnesses like Mark and Tara, who ostensibly remain untouched by and unconcerned with the boycott beyond their professional interest. Furthermore, Suzie’s declaration at the play’s conclusion that the best stories are “invented” institutes a divide between the possibilities of the real and the fictive—a gap that Smith repeatedly excavates and complicates in Twilight.
Aptly, these points of difference between Twilight and Kimchee and Chitlins may be the openings for further explorations of the potential for cross-racial performances to mediate interracial conflicts. Given the ongoing difficulty of responding verbally and practically to interracial tensions, the unlikely possibilities offered by invention and embodiment across conventions of journalistic inquiry and theatrical participation, as well as racial identification, might well be worth continued examination. The perils of cross-racial performance are evident in a long history of caricatures that reinforce stereotypes and direct ridicule at their subjects, as well as in recent struggles over casting in which claims of following “color-blind” practices can justify opening or closing opportunities to minority actors. Yet Smith and Wong’s works suggest that cross-racial performances also hold the promise of articulating overlooked relations of affiliation, influence, and accountability. When Bourdieu argues that the “body believes in what it plays at,”72 he distinguishes between the involuntary mimetic transmission of the habitus, which is what he is explicating, and the conscious imitation of an actor. Twilight and Kimchee and Chitlins tentatively propose, however, that attempting to play the mundane of others may lead the body to believe differently.