CHAPEL HILL -- With references to President Bush and Saddam Hussein, and video images of buildings and vehicles spewing flames, men in the streets firing guns and kicking the daylights out of each other, StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance's latest production is a bit eerie. We see these images frequently these days on world newscasts. But StreetSigns' drama doesn't unfold in the Middle East, nor in the present. The year is 1992. The president is George H.W. Bush, and the streets are in Los Angeles. On the screen, that's Rodney King on the ground, a black man dragged from his car, being kicked, slammed and battered by police -- 55 times in 81 seconds. It's at the core of Anna Deveare Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," a nearly two-hour multimedia documentary of war and its aftermath on the streets of Los Angeles, deftly directed by Derek Goldman in Swain Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The King beating was captured on videotape by an onlooker and aired nationwide, but the police were acquitted by a mostly white jury. That verdict set off the three-day riot in which Reginald Denny was dragged from his semi. He was beaten senseless to pay for the sins visited upon King, a man the white trucker never heard of, an incident he couldn't remember and a politic he was oblivious to until the Rev. Jesse Jackson came through his hospital door.

Smith's work is a brilliant and disturbing narrative case study about racial, cultural and ethnic abuse perpetrated by those who hold the power and those oppressed by it. And although the media played it out as a black and white issue, Smith and StreetSigns show us the wide-ranging hues of those affected by the racism: African-Americans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Caucasians and Koreans.

Smith interviewed 200 people affected by the King events. She created a verbatim collage and performed all the roles herself in the original production. In this production, 15 actors play 36 roles, from Denny to Mayor Tom Bradley, Charlton Heston, Police Chief Daryl Gates and Black Panther party leader Elaine Brown, witnesses, victims, gang members and jurors. Everyone but King.

That's the beauty of Smith's collage: It delivers many points of view in many forms, and the juxtapositions are interesting. There's a bone-chilling narrative smack up against a piece that makes us laugh -- uncomfortably, like in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." There's even a gruesome description of decomposing bodies delivered with rhythmic precision by Carl Martin.

Sherida McMullan portrays a wildly angry woman on a rant about the social and economic injustice against her people, and how the media feed off it. McMullan, all musical and rhythmed up, is an electrical engineering grad from Howard University. She knows exactly how to calibrate her own electric energy. She is one to watch. So is Torrey Lawrence. He's part dancer, part rapper, part preacher all wrapped up in a glorious physical presence that mesmerizes. Katrina Harper does a rousing Maxine Waters, and Rick Lonon delivers a wonderfully understated Denny.

The entire cast pulls this talky production off well, delivering their monologues from an interview chair that Goldman moves around the stage. He segues with bits and pieces of music from Nina Simone's opening "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" to The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" and punctuates with startling sounds of breaking glass, all produced by Emily Hanford.

The end is a bit clunky and contrived as the entire cast coalesces on stage, finishing each other's sentences and adopting each other's postures. But "Twilight" is a play that we all need to see again and again so we don't forget. As one character says, looking at the tape of the riots: "Isn't human life sad? Isn't human life cheap? Let's play it again."