Why Fires in the Mirror Still Matters Decades Later
Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deavere Smith is a documentary theatre piece that uses a method she basically invented on her own. You interview real people, record their exact words, and then you perform those words as if they were your own. No interpretation, no added dialogue, just the actual speech patterns and rhythms of whatever person you studied. The piece premiered in 1993 around the Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn. It featured dozens of real residents, clergy, activists, and law enforcement officers, all channeled through Smith's performances. The core technique is what she calls "research-based portraiture." She does hours of tape-recorded interviews with people who experienced or witnessed the events the work addresses. Then she transcribes them word for word. After that, she learns each interviewee's physicality, voice, cadence, and vocabulary until she can reproduce their speech so closely that audiences sometimes think a different person is on stage. I first encountered this when I was doing a community project in LA back in the late 90s. We were trying to create something similar for our neighborhood after some riots hit the area. I read the script for Fires in the Mirror and realized how much harder this was than it looked on paper. The text alone is almost 200 pages. Getting the performance right meant more than memorization. It meant actually inhabiting someone else's lived experience without turning them into a caricature.
One thing nobody tells you about working with this material: the interviews aren't the finished product. They're raw footage. You have to edit heavily while preserving the actual language. I spent weeks with a single transcript trying to find the connective tissue between two people who didn't know each other existed in the same neighborhood. The trick is letting the juxtaposition do the work. You don't need to explain the contradiction. You just place one person's statement right after another person's and let the audience sit with the gap. The structure of Fires in the Mirror is deliberately non-linear. There is no protagonist. There is no traditional arc. It's a series of portraits arranged around themes that emerged from the interviews themselves. Smith organizes around recurring phrases and images that appear across multiple conversations. In Crown Heights, the central tensions revolved around race, property, belonging, and who gets to tell the story of what happened. The piece doesn't resolve these. It lets them remain open.
How to Actually Perform or Study This Work
If you're studying Fires in the Mirror for a class or workshop, don't just read the script. Listen to the original performance recordings if you can find them. Smith's delivery varies slightly between the 1993 premiere and later productions. The text itself has been revised over the years. Make sure you're working from a recent edition, because she added material after later events and removed sections that didn't hold up. When you pick an interviewee to perform, choose someone whose worldview genuinely troubles you. That's the whole point of the piece. You're not performing people who agree with you. You're performing people whose lives are fundamentally different from your own, including people you might personally disagree with or even find difficult. I learned this the hard way during a staging where I kept picking characters I felt comfortable with. The result was shallow. Once I started choosing people whose perspectives made me uncomfortable, the work actually became interesting. The technical side is brutal. You need to capture rhythm, not just words. How someone pauses. Where they stress a particular word. The specific vowel sounds they use. I remember struggling for two weeks with one character who spoke in a very specific Queens cadence. I kept sounding like I was mocking her. The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to act and started listening to the recording on loop while I walked around. Eventually my body just absorbed the pattern without my conscious effort.
Get the Full Details
Another practical issue: getting permission to use interview material in a workshop setting. Smith's work is produced through her company and the text is published, but if you're building your own version using your own interviews, you need to be careful about consent. I once worked with someone who used transcripts from community conversations without getting explicit permission from the people who spoke. That turned into a real problem when the subjects found out. Get it in writing. Even for educational purposes.
What This Work Gets Wrong or Overlooks
I should be honest about the limitations. Fires in the Mirror has been criticized for reducing complex political and economic conditions to personal testimony. The form emphasizes individual voice over structural analysis. Sometimes that's the point. Smith has said she's interested in how people actually talk about things, not how academics or politicians talk about them. But the tradeoff is real. You can get the texture of lived experience without addressing the systems that shaped that experience. There's also the question of representation. A single performer, no matter how skilled, can only approximate so many voices. I've seen productions where the performer was too charismatic and the piece became more about their talent than the people being represented. Other times the opposite happened. The portraits felt flat and the performances didn't convince. If you're teaching this, be prepared to discuss those critiques directly. The piece isn't a neutral document. It's Smith's curated version of events, edited and arranged according to her own sensibility. That's fine. Nothing in theatre is neutral. But presenting it as purely objective would be dishonest.
The best approach is to pair it with other materials. Academic analyses of the Crown Heights conflict. News coverage from the time. Legal documents and official reports. Let students compare how different forms of language handle the same events. The gap between a police report and a community member's testimony is where a lot of the real insight lives.
Where to Find the Text
The play is published by Riverhead Books and is available through most major booksellers and academic suppliers. University presses often carry it at a discount for course adoption. There are also recorded performances available through various academic databases, though the rights situation varies. If you're doing a classroom production, contact the rights holder directly rather than assuming educational use covers everything. The full script runs long. Don't try to use the entire piece in a single workshop session. Pick three or four portraits that speak to each other and build from there. The work holds up better in fragments than in compressed versions of the full text. I've seen groups try to squeeze everything into ninety minutes. It never works. The audience can't absorb that many voices in a row. Better to go deep on four characters than wide across twelve.
