Anna Deavere Smith's play Fires in the Mirror is a part of her project On the Road: A Search for the American Character. It is a series of monologues which she has created from interviews. Fires in the Mirror chronicles the Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn, New York in August 1991. In that racially divided neighborhood, populated largely by African Americans and Chabad Hasidic Jews, a car driven by a Jewish man veered onto a sidewalk and struck two children, killing Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old Caribbean-American boy. The death, and what the African-American community perceived as a delayed response of city emergency medical personnel, sparked protests by them in the neighborhood. During these, a group of black youths attacked and fatally injured Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish student visiting from Australia. Days of rioting ensued, exposing to national scrutiny the depth of the racial divisions in Crown Heights. The rioting resulted in 190 injuries, 129 arrests, and an estimated one million dollars in property damage.[1]
Smith interviewed residents of Crown Heights, including participants in the disturbances, as well as leading politicians, writers, musicians, religious leaders, and intellectuals. From this material, she chose which figures to highlight and speeches to use in the monologues of her play. Through the words of 26 different people, in 29 monologues, Smith explores how and why these people signaled their identities, how they perceived and responded to people different from themselves, and how barriers between groups can be breached. "My sense is that American character lives not in one place or the other", Smith writes in her introduction to the play, "but in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences." The title of the play suggests a vision of art as a site of reflection where the passions and fires of a specific moment can be examined from a new angle, contemplated, and better understood.[2]
