Reading Response to Smith's "Fires in the Mirror"

For many audience members and readers, it is all too easy to get caught up in the story behind Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Brooklyn, Crown Heights, and Other Identities. I know that I personally was not at all familiar with the events of the Crown Heights riots until reading this play in class, and I was immensely intrigued both by the story and Smith’s own presentation of the events from various perspectives of the community.

Many audience members and readers will want to dismiss the play’s first sixteen or so monologues because they do not have any direct bearing on the story of the riots; however, Smith’s choice to include these monologues about identity (both racial and religious) reveals much about the social forces in effect that brought the Crown Heights riot to its climax. After all, if audience members do not first understand how black and Lubavich members of the Crown Heights community express their own identities and how they regard one another, it can be very difficult to understand why the tensions that led to the riots even existed in the first place.

Monologues from some Lubavich women describe various religious practices, such as keeping their hair short and wearing wigs and now using electronics on the Sabbath, as a way of illustrating how they are a close-knit community that is dependent upon one another for help and support. In a similar vein, one young black girl talks about how the other students in her class use their hair as a way of expressing their racial identities. Already, we see how something as simple as hairstyle can be used to express and shape a person’s identity.