Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Although he is the central figure in the tragedy, we never actually hear from Rodney King. The trauma of his ordeal (“He […] went through three plastic surgeons just to look like Rodney again”) must instead be conveyed through the words of his aunt, Angela King (54). In one of the most poignant interviews in the entire play, Angela King shines light on the young Rodney King no one knows, a unique boy who could go down in the creek and catch fish with his bare hands, like “them wild Africans,” and for whom his particular tragedy made little sense: “We weren’t raised like this. We weren’t raised with no black and white thing. We were raised with all kinds of friends: Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, Whites, Chinese. You never would have known that something like this would happen to us” (53, 55).

Angela King is particularly bitter about the prying of the media and about the monstrous disparity between coverage of, and reaction to, things that happen to people in power and to the countless “nobodies,” like her nephew: “You see how everybody rave when something happens with the President of the United States? Okay, here’s a nobody, but the way they beat [Rodney], this is the way I felt towards him” (57).