By Jason Romney

Conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith

Venue: Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre

Synopsis: an evocation of the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum

Rating: 5 stars

This production holds up a mirror to the immensely complex political and racial brew in contemporary New York. The genius of its image is that the disparate ingredients it reflects - be they anger or passion, the philosophising of the intellectual or rhetoric of the preacher - are evoked by just one woman performer.

Anna Deavere Smith, playwright, performance artist and consummate actor, creates 27 characters in 100 minutes. Her performance is based on the interview material she collected which in some way illuminates the stabbing to death of a young Jewish Australian, Yankel Rosenbaum, in New York on August 20, 1991.

Some of the play's characters, such as Yankel's brother Norman, or the father of a black boy who was run over in an incident preceding the stabbing, were directly involved.

Others, such as a physicist from MIT or Angela Davis, the History of Consciousness professor from Santa Cruz University, speak about the underlying issues of race or philosophy.

There is also the contradictory evidence relating to the alleged car accident which comes from various anonymous onlookers. Was the Jewish man who drove the van drunk? Did the private Jewish ambulance fail to treat the black boy and concentrate instead on the Jewish driver who was beaten by the Afro-American black onlookers?

And then there is the political dimension captured by interviews with Black community leaders and Rabbis.

This immensely complex tapestry remains unresolved. Indeed, the numerous quick cutting scenes that present the various testimonies are never wrenched around by any attempt to impose a unifying "throughline". It is clear that any such effort would be inevitably over reductive.

Smith's transitions are mostly instantaneous with only the slightest assistance from a discreet costume or prop. A small amount of identification is flashed up on a rear projection screen. Sometimes there is music.

It would have been all too easy for props - gadgets, or perhaps some array of superfluous tizzy bits tacked onto the characterisations - to obscure the monologues central dramatic core or dilute their power.

But Smith's physical comfort with her body is all she needs. Challenges that face the female performer, such as channeling masculine energy through the female form with entire tempo changes flowing from the transition, are effortlessly accomplished.

This is very much a triumph of pace as well as content - no character is ever sustained too long or overlabored. Smith's feel for the right pacing applies not just from speech to speech, but in each monologue eccentricities of delivery or quirks of speech are effortlessly juggled.

Overall, Smith seizes her audience's analytical and emotional roots with unrelenting rigor. Her command of voice, body and the large stage space around which she moves is masterful. And most importantly, not one skerrick of bitterness clouds the canvas - leaving us free to think, and enjoy, a very unusual night of theatre.