Israel Horovitz, Volume III: The Primary English Class and Six New Plays Book

Smith is a marvel. "House Arrest" is, like her two best known works, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, an artfully crafted drama by interview and primary source (since it includes tales of the White House from Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR's times, as well as the first George Bush and Bill Clinton). There is less dramatic coherence in House Arrest, perhaps because it doesn't hinge around a single event, as Fires and Twilight each do. Instead it looks at memory and history and changing perceptions of news and privacy, with race and inequality as filters of perspective. Studs Terkel begins and ends the play, commenting on an awkward public moment rescued by a baby's laugh: "Thank God for a human reaction! We haven't lost yet!" Piano is a conventionally written play, a historical drama set in Cuba on the eve of the rebellion that got subsumed in the Spanish American War. For a while it is very interesting than it just fizzles into clichés and cartoon characters'a bombastic, bullying Spanish general, a pre-flapper turned political operator. Smith is a master of the interview and organizing people's words into telling narrative structures but doesn't seem to have the same caliber ear when, instead of putting other people's words into her mouth, she is putting her words into other people's mouths. House Arrest gets a 4; Piano a 2 or less.