SOURCE: An interview in Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1993, p. M3.

[In the interview below, Smith discusses the effects of the 1992 race riots on Los Angeles and her reasons for writing Twilight.]

One critic calls her the most exciting individual in current American theater. Another complains her work is emotionally unengaging and analytically shallow. She's been praised as a keen social observer of Los Angeles and condemned as an outsider who has exploited the city in tragedy. Whatever their opinions people are talking about Anna Deavere Smith and her one woman show, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Her performance about the violence following the verdict in the Rodney G King-beating trial completes a five-week run at the Mark Taper next Sunday.

Smith, 42, sprang to prominence last year, with another one-woman show about a racial clash, Fires in the Mirror. Shortly after the verdict in the first King beating trial, the Taper's...