Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Twilight Bey, organizer of the gang truce. They meet in a Denny’s restaurant in February of 1993. Twilight explains the origins of his name: when was a young boy, he’d stay out until the sun came up. He acted as a “watchdog,” ensuring no rivals entered his neighborhood. Additionally, people would tell him he had “more wisdom than those / twice [his] age.” One night, while he was at home writing, he replaced the “ce” at the end of “twice” and found “twilight.” He notes how light symbolizes knowledge and wisdom in the Koran and the Bible. He also notes how twilight conveys a sense of “limbo,” which he associates with people always telling him he was “before [his] time.” When Twilight first broached the idea of a truce in 1988, nobody believed it would happen. Yet, in 1992, it did.
Twilight Bey is the namesake for Smith’s play. His analysis of the “limbo” quality of twilight resonates with Homi Bhabha and Betye Saar’s monologues in Act Four. His ability to be “before [his] time” and imagine new ways of being and new social orders aligns with Bhabha’s argument, which is that twilight and uncertainty gives people the opportunity to completely break with past social structures and invent and organize new, improved structures.
Themes
Twilight Bey continues to meditate on being “stuck in limbo.” He feels “like the sun is stuck between night and day.” Unlike a lot of people, Twilight doesn’t associate nighttime or darkness with negativity. He sees it as “what was first.” He describes seeing “darkness as [him]self” and “light as knowledge […] of the world.” He asserts that “to be a true human being,” one must bridge this divide between darkness and lightness, between self and world.
Twilight Bey’s belief that one has to move beyond oneself “to be a true human being” resonates with the play’s insistence that it’s necessary to transcend racial and class boundaries to work toward a more equal world. Essentially, he suggests people must be less selfish and more curious about other people, or nothing will change.
Themes
Twilight Bey feels as though he never sleeps. Late at night, he watches young kids beating an old man. He scolds them, asking why they’re out doing this and aren’t at home, where they belong. During the day, he sees “the living dead,” people who are severely addicted to crack-cocaine. Seeing the “living dead” makes Twilight understand that “what goes in the daytime creates at night.”
Twilight sees the young children who run around committing acts of violence at night and “the living dead” who are addicted to crack-cocaine by day as part of a connected system that feeds off itself: this is what he means when he states, “what goes in the daytime creates the night.” Twilight—the limbo time between night and day, darkness and light—is critical because it’s where a person can step in and break this cycle of violence, trauma, and oppression.
Themes
