Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Reginald Denny’s presence is unavoidable here. Short of Rodney King himself, Denny became the most visible face of the entire verdict/riot cycle. In acknowledgment of his central role, Smith places Denny’s lengthy testimony squarely in the middle of the play. Set up by the preceding two interviews—ground reporter Judith Tur’s “War Zone” and ex-gang member Allen Cooper’s “Bubble Gum Machine”—Denny must be reckoned with as a symbol, appropriate or misapplied, of white victimhood. That is one of the central themes that emerges from this collage of transcripts: the idea that somehow King’s victimhood—which exposed the victimhood of black America within a system of institutionalized racism—wound up getting completely subverted into a validation of whites’ fear of black America.

The fact of Denny’s whiteness before black aggressors suggested that both sides, black and white, were competing for the status of victimhood, both sides laying claim to being under siege. Tur offers a vivid sense of this, calling Denny’s assailants and onlookers “animals” and declaring her United States no longer recognizable. Counterposed to this, Allen Cooper, “Big Al,” simply reads the Denny incident as another media sideshow, a “joke,” that, like the Rodney King episode, skillfully diverts attention from the real structural problems confronting black America.