'TWILIGHT' DATED, BUT STILL ILLUMINATING.

Byline: - David Kronke

When Anna Devere Smith first brought ``Twilight: Los Angeles'' to life at the Mark Taper Forum in 1993, a mere year after the riots that inspired her production, the effect was immediately cathartic. Los Angeles, virtually down to each individual, was still trying to make sense of the cataclysmic uprising in response to those infamous Simi Valley not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial.

Devere Smith, who interviewed hundreds of Angelenos with a myriad of perspectives on the event - and then brought them to uncanny life on stage - helped point out just how malignantly deluded (or, conversely, essentially good-hearted) many of us were and pointed, vaguely, to a greater future understanding.

In 2001, ``Twilight: Los Angeles'' hasn't quite reached the point of becoming a museum piece, but the signs are there. Certainly, in the production of Devere Smith's piece airing tonight on PBS, not enough further perspective has been added - she hasn't really updated the piece to see where her characters are today. Director Marc Levin adds a certain urgency to the proceedings - the individual excerpts from Devere Smith's performances are, overall, shorter than the stage production, and potently punctuated with famous video sequences from the original beating and the subsequent riot. He doesn't, however, add any more understanding to what hit L.A. than the original production did all those years ago.

Still, watching Devere Smith slip effortlessly from one persona to the next - each with different speech patterns and nervous tics - remains a marvel. She essays a self-absorbed Beverly Hills real-estate agent as deftly as she does one of ill-fated trucker Reginald Denny's notorious attackers or a tormented former Korean grocer.

Her take on Denny himself - the man who miraculously found it possible to forgive his brutal attackers and probably helped heal terrible scars a smidgen more quickly - seems less generous today than it was immediately after the riot. He seems more a genial doofus here, rather than an open-minded everyman marveling at his life's odd turns in the original stage production. She juxtaposes his optimistic vision of the riot's fallout - establishing a shrine to all the people who supported him - with a sobering monologue by an angry young activist imagining his own shrine, to his own blind hatred and its resulting violence.

Indeed, in an effort to underscore her piece's enduring resonance, she closes with an activist's plea for understanding, a subtle warning that the calm that has been maintained since 1992 shouldn't be taken for granted. Devere Smith suggests that all of us in Los Angeles, by persistently refusing to try to relate to those different from ourselves, continue to stand in the twilight that represents a kind of limbo - between ignorance and acceptance, between peace and the next conflagration that could erupt if we don't decisively unite.

``TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES''

What: Film adaptation of Anna Devere Smith's one-woman stage production reflecting on the 1992 L.A. riots.

Where: KCET.

When: 9 p.m Sunday.

Our rating: Three stars

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Anna Devere Smith brings several personas to life in ``Twilight: Los Angeles,'' her reflection on the 1992 L.A. riots.