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Arts & Entertainment

'Fires in the Mirror' Burns Bright Once Again

Hoboken High School's One-Night-Only Presentation Another Showcase for Theatrical Excellence

In August 1991, Yosef Lifsh, a Lubavitch Jew, unintentionally drove onto a sidewalk in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and killed 7-year-old Guyanese resident Gavin Cato, setting the stage for a three-day riot that amplified racial tensions between blacks and Jews in the community. Stores were looted and cars destroyed. At least 129 arrests were made, 175 people injured, and two people were killed, including 29-year-old grad student Yankel Rosenbaum, in what is now described as one of the most violent examples of anti-semitism in recent history.

Fortunately, out of the ugly event came something beautiful. Playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith interviewed observers and participants of the Crown Heights riot, the result being, "Fires in the Mirror," which first premiered in New York City in 1992. 

Consisting of 30 monologues grouped by themes including "Identity" and "Race," each monologue is inspired and culled from Smith's interviews, portraying the community's varied reactions. Though the monologues aren't told linearly—not even chronologically—it's easy enough to follow, and the cumulative end result is powerful and enlightening.

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For Hoboken High School to stage a production of the play is extremely ambitious. "Fires in the Mirror" is by no means easy to pull off for actors of any age. Let alone those in their teens who presumably still don't have many life experiences to draw from for creative inspiration, or might not fully comprehend the gravity of the monologues.  

However, neither was an issue for the high school's encore presentation last Saturday. Twenty-four of the twenty five actors presented their various monologues—due to unforeseen circumstances, Charles Espinoza did not reprise the role of Henry Rice that evening—and the result was a shockingly mature, polished group of performances that remained painfully truthful to their source material.

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In particular, Samuel Olmedo channeled an excellent Al Sharpton for his two monologues. The mop of black curls, impassioned speech and over-the-top gesticulations were spot-on.

As Monique "Big Mo" Matthews, Imani Hightower was lively, charming, and utterly believable while she ranted about the objectification of women in rap.

Patric Adil Oualidi's appropriately clinical take on his monologue about how mirrors can distort images served as an apt allegory for how people's perceptions of something–in this case, those of the Crown Heights riot–can be warped and subjective. But Saquan Williams, whose performance as Black Studies professor Leonard Jeffries recently won him the Governor's Award at this year's STANJ theater awards, was probably the highlight of the evening. While his monologue wasn't the flashiest, most controversial, or even the most moving–Christopher Velez's take on Rosenbaum's brother wins that title hands-down–Williams comes across as the most convincing. His intelligent, carefully thought-out performance is one of wonderful understatement.

The stage itself was a marvelous marriage of minimalism and new media, a platform of wooden beams wedded to sheets of mylar that allowed the production team to project images and video clips onto them, like transparent movie screens. Video clips of the riots played intermittently, and images changed according to the character onstage: a background of the galaxy while Oualidi spoke of physics and telescopes, a domestic setting while Roslyn Malamud, a Lubavicher Jew and Crown Heights resident, cut up vegetables, and so on.  The performances alone could—and did—speak for themselves, but with the addition of the sets, this presentation of "Fires in the Mirror" was a transcendental experience that in this jaded theatergoer's eyes, defied one's expectations for the typical high school play.  

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