I understand the concerns you have about the necessity of
the beginning monologues in the play and I understand that you think you can
cut them and still retain the meaning of the piece. I’m worried about the execution
of that and what cutting them will do to the play. Let me explain:
In the first few monologues in Fires in the Mirror, Smith is setting the scene. They don’t directly relate
to the riots in Crown Heights, but they directly show the people involved. They
show how these people lived and acted outside of the riots before the major
conflict began. If these monologues were to be cut out we would lose the story
of the people involved. We would lose how the felt before and how they felt
after and the play would become less about the characters and more about just
reporting what happened. Sure you would get two sides of what happened but
without those first few monologues setting up how the two different
demographics view their lives, all we would see was needless fighting.
