Theater, Emotions, and Healing Group Trauma

As an actress and scholar of theater with an abiding interest in psychoanalysis, I am examining in this article how the emotions of group trauma can be expressed in theatrical performance and how this re-enactment can aid in the healing process. My study is based on the 1991 Crown Heights riot and the performance is Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1993). I investigate how this solo performance addresses emotions and the task of racial healing in contemporary America. I will start with the incident and then discuss Smith’s methodology, the play, and its broader social significance.

On a hot summer night, August 19, 1991, the Grand Rebbe of the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Jews was returning to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, from his weekly visit to the grave of his former wife. His motorcade included two cars, an unmarked police escort, and a third car, driven by Yosef Lifsh and carrying two other Hasidic passengers. At one point Lifsh’s car ran a red light, hit another car, jumped the curb, and pinned two African-American children to a window grating. Angela Cato was seriously injured; her cousin, Galvin, age seven, was killed. Rumor quickly spread that a private ambulance service operated by Jews was first to arrive on the scene and came to the aid of the Hasidic driver and his passengers while neglecting the wounded black children, one of whom lay dying. Three hours later, in retaliation for what the African-Americans perceived as the murder of a helpless child by the Hasidim, a group of black youths a few blocks away surrounded a young Hebrew scholar visiting from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, and stabbed him to death These events sparked three days of civil unrest and Brooklyn became the site of widespread arson, looting, and rioting in which citizens, police, and journalists were beaten. Both African-American and Jewish groups protested the city’s handling of the incidents.

Anna Deavere Smith is renowned for developing a new genre of performance which combines journalism and social commentary in order to investigate sites of cultural conflict. With tape recorder in hand, this African-American woman frequents sites of civic unrest and gathers dramatic material by conducting interviews with people in the middle of emotional, social, and political maelstroms. These interviews are then used as texts for one-woman shows in which she performs the people she has interviewed. Fires in the Mirror is one of these solo performances. This docudrama had its New York City premiere at the Public Theatre in 1992 and was runner-up for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.

Performing barefoot in black pants and a white shirt a year after the riots, Smith restaged the events of Crown Heights based on taped interviews taken from the residents of the neighborhood including Galvin Cato’s father, Yankel Rosenbaum’s brother, civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton, a local rabbi, a Lubavitcher woman, and several anonymous community members—men and women across a range of age, racial, and economic differences. Mimicking the physical presence, accents, and vocal rhythms of her informants, the performer re-enacted the conflict for the community of blacks and Jews in which the events occurred. Smith calls herself an “empty vessel, a repeater,” an inhabiter of other peoples’ words. (Smith, Fires in the Mirror, 1993, p. xxv) These personal monologues make evident the conflicts of communal life and foreground the groups’ racial, religious, sexual, and generational tensions.

The crisis that erupted in Crown Heights on that muggy August evening reflected longstanding antagonisms between the Lubavitchers and blacks. Those living in the neighborhood felt that the entourage of the Lubavitcher’s spiritual leader was an intrusion and that the Hasidic sect enjoyed special concessions condoned by local law enforcement agencies. Blacks were resentful that the motorcade of Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, accompanied by a police escort, crossed that same intersection each week exceeding the legal speed limit, and that traffic on major thoroughfares was suspended during Jewish holidays and times of worship. The Jews were generally seen as enjoying privileges in the community and projecting an air of superiority. In turn, the Lubavitchers harbored suspicions of the black community and felt increasingly threatened by black anti-Semitism and street crime in the neighborhood. The rioting included chants of “Heil Hitler” and calls to “Kill the Jews” and “Heat Up the Ovens.”

Part of the idea behind this docudrama was to attract people to the theatre who didn’t usually go to the theatre, to bring people together in the same room who normally would not be in close

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physical proximity, and to engage them in discourse. The Lubavitchers, from England, the Middle East, Australia, and South Africa, are a particularly insular community due to their Orthodox style of dress and religious codes of behavior. They are members of a Jewish sect that fled Nazi Germany during World War П. Many members of the black community were Caribbean immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad, often without U.S. citizenship.

Smith’s work is a kind of theatrical “talking therapy.” In her early performances presented for the community of Crown Heights, the audience often erupted spontaneously in verbal response. Blacks in the audience gave commentary during the show with expressions like “Yes,” “All right,” and “Teach.” Smith says, “Once I heard a woman saying throughout the show, ‘Oy’… When the audience talks, they are talking as much to each other as to me” (Smith, Mirror, p. xxxviii). Post performance discussions in which both black and Lubavitcher community members responded to Smith’s portrayal of the people and events of Crown Heights were also crucial in initiating a cultural discourse.

In the performance I attended, Smith represented both sides with even-handedness, illustrating the complex emotions, customs, and territorial concerns of both communities. In addition to her own racial ambiguity as a light-skinned African-American, there is a chameleon-like quality to her appearance that enables her to move across various ethnic lines and impersonate different kinds of people with ease. Smith grew up in Baltimore during segregation terrified of white kids and haunted by images of blacks being burned and hung from trees. Her world as a child was almost entirely a world of black people and it wasn’t until she was a teenager that she had a white teacher or shared a classroom with Caucasian students.

A large part of the purpose behind her performance work is to promote civic dialogue and a new understanding of racial difference in such moments of cultural crisis. The stage, in this case, offers an intermediate realm of play, a territory distinct from the terrain of either the black or the Jewish community to work through unresolved emotions. Specifically, Smith is interested in how the language of an individual reflects the character of the group. As she puts it, “I travel in pursuit of language, my tape recorder is my camera” (Anna Deavere Smith, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics, 2000, p. 80). As words reveal what is unseen in an individual, the recorded interviews are for her a “snapshot” of what is unseen about group formation and affect.

The performer studies her subjects’ language and breaths intently, replaying the interviews over and over again. She listens particularly for those points in an interview characterized by the breakdown of syntax, where grammar fumbles and words fall apart. Awaiting these moments where the interviewee loses words or makes sounds that often have nothing to do with words is crucial to her purpose. “I watch breakdowns of communication the way the morning helicopter looks for traffic delays,” she says. (Smith, Talk to Me, p. 294) This is a kind of speech pattern that connects to another level of consciousness, a discourse characterized by slips of tongue and stammerings such as “urns” and “uhs.” For Smith, the psychology of a person lives inside these places of syntactical rupture, the moments when language fails. Such instances are poetic keystones. As she puts it, “Character is alive inside syntactical breaks” (Smith, Mirror, p. xl). These verbal flounderings often disclose traces of a traumatic encounter, experiences of overwhelming emotion.

Smith incorporates her informants and their experience of trauma, acting as a sort of ritual shaman who attempts to cure a possessed or diseased patient. (Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” TDR: The Drama Review 37, 4 [Winter 1993], pp. 63-64) For the spectator, the performance becomes primarily a way of externalizing an internal conflict or mental representation. In other words, Smith enables the transference of affect and creates an emotional bridge for the audience who utilizes her to externalize unresolved aspects of grief.

D.W. Winnicott elaborates a similar process of creative adaptation through the notion of the transitional object: the edge of a worn blanket, a favorite doll or soft toy, a tune, a soothing lullaby. This beloved object functions as a bridge between the child and his surroundings, and signifies emotional adaptation and a budding sense of self. The transitional process continues throughout adult life. It becomes the location of play with art objects and the space of cultural activities. (D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971, pp. 38-52)

According to Vamık D. Volkan and Elizabeth Zintl, a linking object—which may also be a living person—is a derivative of the transitional object. It serves as an emotional reservoir and corresponds symbolically to an internalized psychic image (an

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introject). Linking objects are used to restage a former relationship outside ourselves, to recapture its vitality and conflict. As Volkan and Zintl describe it, “Linking objects play the song of the relationship” (Life After Loss: The Lessons of Grief 1993, p. 80). In like manner, Smith’s onstage body functions as a psychological container for the spectator, providing an external locus for emotion and feelings of anguish left in the wake of a brutal racial exchange. Externalizing grief in this way gives the mourner a way of rediscovering the painful situation—Cato’s death and the stabbing of Rosenbaum—and working through some of the emotions associated with despair and irreparable loss.

It is my conclusion that this performance promotes the process of working through trauma by instilling in the spectator an element of analytic or critical perspective. As a participant in her audience, one is inevitably confronted with a rush of affect in response to circumstances of loss and murderous rage. And yet, at the same time, one gains some measure of critical distance from the events. As with interpretations from the analyst, Smith shows how it is possible to recognize an unbearably painful situation of loss within multiple personal contexts. What emerges from her docudrama is a multiplicity of perspectives rarely expressed within the black-Jewish dialogue. Through subjects like “hair,” “wigs,” “ovens,” “race,” “rhythm,” “rap,” “poetry” and “rage,” the actress restages the events of Crown Heights as seen through the experience of blacks, Caribbeans, Jews, Gentiles, men, and women. Rather than assuming a singular viewpoint or dramatizing a unified history of Crown Heights, this re-enactment portrays divergent and often vehemently conflicting beliefs.

The interviews frequently highlight feelings of inclusiveness through the use of pronouns such as “us” and “we.” In other instances, the mentality of me-you or us-them gives way to cross-cultural affiliations and the spectator becomes aware of various levels of inclusion and exclusion. Certain categories of belonging such as black or Jewish become refracted as if in a broken mirror. The audience is able to experience the shifting experiences of identification and detachment. Smith inspires us to contemplate these dynamic oscillations that characterize our fives and the way we participate in multiple identifications. As we witness her embodiment of various characters we relive the experience of moving back and forth between the many social worlds we inhabit.

The overall structure of the play is disjointed, dreamlike. Staging is minimal, the sequence of interviews emerging through random association. The actual events of Crown Heights are recounted in the concluding section through the monologues of Norman Rosenbaum, brother of Yankel, as he describes the circumstances surrounding the discovery of his brother’s murder. This final portion of the docudrama also relates the testimony of Carmel Cato, father of Galvin, the seven-year-old killed in the car accident while learning to ride his bike. In these impersonations, Smith carries the affective residues of despair, fear, anger, and confusion—lending her body as a medium or channel for the discharge of emotion.

In the same way that external monuments are often significant in the handling of group mourning, these motley embodiments mobilize collective feeling and foster the externalization of grief, rage, and sorrow. In this sense, Anne Deavere Smith acts as a living monument, providing a viable public attempt to address melancholia and animate the regenerative work of mourning.

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