What metaphors are used in Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deavere Smith?

The enflamed, raging identity that blacks and Jews from Crown Heights see when they look in the mirror is Smith's most important metaphor for the identity crisis at the root of the violence in the neighborhood. Smith implies that a central motif of the play, searching for an image of an individual's identity, is comparable to seeing in a mirror a burning flame that consumes any notion of the complex, interrelated, historically aware conception of what identity really is.