Michael Benjamin Washington to Star in Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror
(© David Gordon)
Michael Benjamin Washington (The Boys in the Band) will star in Signature Theatre's upcoming revival of Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, directed by Saheem Ali and running October 22-November 24 at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
The solo show will feature a creative team made up of Arnulfo Maldonado (scenic design), Dede M. Ayite (costume design), Alan C. Edwards (lighting design), Mikaal Sulaiman (sound design) and Hannah Wasileski (projection design), and Dawn-Elin Fraser (dialect coach).
The first major production since its premiere 25 years ago, Fires in the Mirror is described as follows: "There are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth. Following the deaths of a Black American boy and a young Orthodox Jewish scholar in the summer of 1991, underlying racial tensions in the nestled community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn erupted into civil outbreak. Fires in the Mirror was Anna Deavere Smith's groundbreaking response. Birthed from a series of interviews with over fifty members of the Jewish and Black communities, the Drama Desk Award-winning work translated their voices verbatim, and in the process revolutionized the genre of documentary theatre."
Fires in the Mirror launches Anna Deavere Smith's Residency 1 at Signature, which will be followed by Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 in 2020.
