Fires in the Mirror - A Reflection

Photo credit: Bill Sigafoos / Firehouse Theatre

When I was in grad school, in one of my early classes, my professors talked about how the texts tell as that the artist should be like a clear vessel to let the colors of characters through to the audience. I really, really struggled with that concept. It seemed completely contradictory to what I’d always heard: draw inward from your experiences to express emotions in dance.

I had reconciled with the two concepts from an intellectual perspective since then, but I had a moment of understanding this viscerally, through every fiber of my being, last month.

Two Sundays ago, I attended the closing night show of Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror at the Firehouse Theatre in Richmond, Va. The play was directed by Katrinah Carol Lewis and performed by fellow W&M alum and Aguas Arts Ink artist Jamar Jones.

Holy smokes.

The context is important here, because it made everything so much more poignant. The play itself is set around the events of August 1991, when there were race riots in Crown Heights, in New York City. It is played today, at a time when we have openly seen racial animus paraded at rallies, marched through the streets of Charlottesvile, and injecting vitriol into public discourse. Also, it is a moment when the different “parties” were looking to institutions and community for justice - just as we are today, as we see one jarring cellphone / body cam recording after another. Oh, and don’t forget the pandemic - that’s why less than a dozen of us in the theater for the performance were masked and socially distanced as we watched all of this.

(When we say “race riots”, there were a string of violent events that precipitated from the death of a young Black boy, Gavin Cato, who was one of two children hit by a vehicle that was part of a Rabbi’s motorcade.)

Music and footage from the time served as a character, including a lime green corded phone that I SO want! Jamar himself, as he changed between roles served as another character in the play, donning different perspectives as easily as he donned wigs and clothes.

There’s a short story I read in college that just stayed with me called The Egg by Andy Weir. There, a man who’d just died meets an authority figure (“God”?) and learns how the entirety of the human experience is connected (I’m keeping it vague so that I don’t spoil it for you). It seemed to me that the stage was that egg, and we were all watching the person on stage live each of these perspectives and experiences before casting them off.

When it comes to this play, I could go chapter-by-chapter with the Natya Shastra, Bharata’s magnificent treatise on dramaturgy that we dancers have claimed for ourselves. The nature of the sangraha - the collection that makes up theater was all there, if in a modernized form. (Those of you not paying attention in dance class - it’s Rasa, bhava, abhinaya, dharmi, vritti, pravritti, siddhi, swara, atodhyam, gaanam, and ranga). It even followed the rules of the Natyashastra, never showing the pivotal killings on stage, yet ruthlessly laying bare the scars those deaths left.

I carry with me the final character in the play, the father of the slain child - an immigrant himself just trying to make sense of the senseless, what no parent should ever experience. The play left me grieving for Gavin Cato, who should have been 37 today, in addition to all the people whose names we’ve been carrying with us these past few years.

I also almost wish I hadn’t waited to see the play until closing night, so that I could’ve urged more people to at least get tickets to the virtual screenings of Jamar’s brilliant show.

And so that I could’ve gone back and watched it a second time.