Anna Deavere Smith

Smith, Anna Deavere (b. 1950), actress and playwright. The African‐American performer was born in Baltimore and educated at Beaver College and American Conservatory Theatre, where she became a member of the acting company. Smith made her Manhattan debut in 1976, but much of her career has been traveling to different cities with the solo performances that she writes. The most memorable of these programs were Fires in the Mirror (1992), about the racial strife in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), about the riots following a controversial trial verdict. David Richards in the New York Times described Smith as “the ultimate impressionist: she does people's souls.”

actor; playwright; college teacher

Personal Information

Born on September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, MD; daughter of Deavere (a coffee merchant) and Anna (an elementary school principal) Smith
Education: Beaver College, PA, BA, 1971; American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, CA, MFA, 1977.

Career

Actor and performance artist, 1978-; Carnegie-Mellon University, acting instructor, 1978-79; University of Southern California, acting instructor, 1980s; National Theater Institute, acting instructor, 1980s; Yale University, visiting artist, 1982; New York University, acting instructor, 1983-84; American Conservatory Theater, acting instructor, 1986; Stanford University, associate professor of drama, 1990-2000; Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Harvard University, founder and director, 1997-2000; Tisch School of the Arts and School of Law, New York University, professor, 2000-.

Life's Work

Anna Deavere Smith is a powerful and distinctive force in American theater. With a characteristic blend of compassion and hard-hitting honesty, she explores provocative topics such as racism, identity, and social justice through original--and highly unconventional--pieces of performance art. In the mid-1990s Newsweek critic Jack Kroll dubbed her "the most exciting individual in the theater" and called her one-woman performance Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 "an American masterpiece." Smith's unique approach to her performances combines theatrical portrayal with scrupulous journalism: for Twilight and her previous piece, Fires in the Mirror, she interviewed scores of people and reproduced their words and mannerisms herself--alone--onstage.

As if these transformations weren't sufficiently miraculous, Smith chose perhaps the most inflammatory issue in modern America--racial and ethnic conflict--as the basis for both shows. Rather than score rhetorical points, however, she chooses to blend diverse and often antagonistic testimonials to achieve balance in her performances. In doing so, argued Time theater critic William Simon III, "she has created a new art form." As Smith herself wrote in Performing Arts, "I am interested in where a person's unique relationship to the spoken word intersects with character." But, just as importantly, she added, "I am also interested in the changing roles of men and women in society, and our current challenge to find new and creative ways to negotiate racial and ethnic difference."

Spawned Early Interest in Language

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 18, 1950, Smith grew up as the youngest of five children. Vogue related that her family's arrival in the city coincided with the beginning of "white flight"--the mass exodus of whites from cities in response to the World War II-era northern migration of blacks. "When I was a little girl," she told the New York Times, "my grandfather told me--and I believed him--that if you say a word often enough it becomes your own." Her father, years later, revised the anecdote: "If you say a word often enough, it becomes you, you become the word." When she was transferred to a mostly Jewish elementary school from an entirely black one, she explained to Vogue that she found herself "excited by the different ways we talked and held ourselves, and I became very interested in language."

This interest, combined with an almost painfully developed sense of compassion, made Smith uniquely qualified for the theater. "One reason I became an actress was that it was a constructive way of dealing with being empathetic," she told Vogue. "As a child, I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but my mother told me I couldn't, because I was too sensitive. A movie like [the tragic interracial romance-musical] West Side Story would make me cry for two days straight."

In Newsweek, Smith described herself as "a nice Negro girl" before arriving at Pennsylvania's Beaver College, then an all-women's institution, where she became somewhat politicized. "I came into my adulthood in a fractured, fragmented world, where the way of being 'black'or 'Negro'or 'colored'had been questioned, the way of being a woman had been questioned, the way of being a man had been questioned," she recalled to the New York Times.

Developed Interviewing Style of Playwriting

Smith considered majoring in linguistics, or perhaps joining the Peace Corps. "I wanted to do something--I didn't know what it was--that had to do with listening to people and trying to cause peace," she said. She made her way West--seeking "the revolution," as she told Vogue--and wound up at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, which awarded her a master's in fine arts in 1976. She took small acting jobs for a short time, and in 1978 she secured a position as an assistant professor in the theater department of prestigious Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While attempting to invigorate and expand her students'ideas about theater, she hit upon the notion of interviewing people in the street and having her students re-enact the interviewees' testimonials.

This process would lead to the development of her one-woman shows. "I realized this approach could serve to mirror a community that was interested in looking at itself," she told the New York Times. "To mirror what they were going through and particularly communities where people were having difficulty saying things to one another or where people felt silenced" by social inequities. Thus Smith went about formulating a kind of theatrical science of empathy.

Over the next several years she served as an acting teacher and visiting artist at Yale University, New York University, and the National Theater Institute; her plays On the Road: A Search for American Character--; the beginning of her cycle of "real life" performance pieces--and Aye, Aye, Aye, I'm Integrated, were staged in 1983 and 1984, in California and New York, respectively. Smith had appeared in the film Soup for One in 1982 and the television soap opera All My Children in 1983. She returned to the American Conservatory Theater in 1986 as a master teacher of acting, then joined the staff of the theater department at the University of Southern California and, later, Stanford University. Having established a solid career acting and teaching, Smith soon catapulted herself into the national limelight with her unique performance pieces that commented on some of America's most difficult racial issues.

Fires Illuminated Tragedy

A tragic conflagration in Crown Heights--a Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood--formed the basis for Smith's Fires in the Mirror, a one-woman performance that debuted in 1992. After a car driven by a Hasidic Jew killed Gavin Cato, a young African-American boy, an enraged mob exacted its vengeance by killing Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish scholar visiting from Australia. The ensuing violent protests, angry threats, and denunciations provided a startling illustration of the depth of America's disunity. Smith's approach to this painful subject followed her usual track: after interviewing scores of witnesses and commentators, she distilled her gathered material into a performance in which she "mirrored" the anger, pain, confusion, and humor of an ethnically and politically mixed group of people. "The result," enthused Newsweek, "is a riveting work that captures the tensions of racial, class and cultural conflict in what is hardly a melting pot but a boiling cauldron."

Smith's repertoire of real-life "characters" in Fires includes Gavin Cato's father; Yankel Rosenbaum's brother; Rabbi Joseph Spielman; black activists Angela Davis, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and Minister Conrad Muhammad; and several Crown Heights residents. Each voice in the performance seems to balance the last, as though each of the mutually contradictory and accusatory statements--and digressions, jokes, and anecdotes--form a piece of a larger puzzle. For Smith, the crux lies in the perspective gained by placing them together. "My voice is the juxtaposition of other voices," she told Newsweek. "It's in the choices I make."

Part of that choice is to let people speak at length, rather than reducing them to the familiar--and often antagonistic--sound bites that make standard news coverage of racial conflict seem so devoid of depth or hope. What's more, the recreation of these real-life texts in the theater finds hidden human dimensions. As she told Emerge magazine, "What I'm interested in is the moment when language is not easy for us." Even when it is easy, however, it often serves to conceal something else. "[British playwright] Harold Pinter says, 'Speech is a strategy to cover nakedness,'" Smith told the New York Times. This nakedness--the yearning, anger, fear, and hope that exist beneath the linguistic strategies of Smith's interviewees and that she conveys with her own voice and body--is the common humanity that only the theater can fully depict. During the course of Fires, theater critic Ralph Rugoff declared in Vogue that "you realize she's changing the way you think about theater." Reviewing a version of the show that appeared on public television, New York critic John Leonard wrote, "Smith is a chameleon and an exorcist. If she can speak in so many tongues, maybe the culture can hear them. As much as performance art, Fires in the Mirror is performance grace."

The Empowering Effects of Twilight

By the time Smith had brought her portrayal of the agonies and hopes of Crown Heights to fruition, Los Angeles had erupted into racial violence and wholesale fear. It all began when four L.A. police officers, who had been videotaped beating a black motorist named Rodney King, were put on trial. In the wake of their acquittal in April of 1992 by an all-white jury, the city saw its fiercest rioting--some called it rebellion--in almost thirty years.

To deal with this piece of history, Smith began assembling a new installment of her On the Road series for the city's Mark Taper Forum. Working with director Emily Mann and a multicultural ensemble of "dramaturges" (specialists in dramatic production), who helped assemble the material, Smith emerged in 1993 with Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. Once again, she culled her performance entirely from interviews; this time she actually revised the piece after it began its run. A revealing interview with a juror in the second trial of the officers involved in the King beating--a federal civil rights trial that resulted in two of the officers being convicted--was quickly developed into a monologue that many regarded as the play's new centerpiece. Smith also portrayed former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, Rodney King's aunt, a Latino artist, and many others; pieces performed in Korean and Spanish--which Smith studied for the play--required supertitles. "As she has narrowed the cast of characters for this show," observed Taper director Gordon Davidson in Performing Arts, "she has come to embody each of them, recreating the rhythms of their speech, absorbing them into her bones." In all Smith performed as 23 real-life black, white, and Korean people.

Each of the "dramaturges" had a specific set of political concerns, and this ideological diversity led to some animated debate during the creation of the play. Additional friction came from some local artists, who considered Smith an outsider. "They said, 'What, you're bringing this success from New York to tell our story? She doesn't know s--t. This punk doesn't belong here,'" she confided to Newsweek. "It made me sad and scared the living daylights out of me. But I understood it and respected it."

Meanwhile, Smith earned the respect and admiration of her Angeleno colleagues. As Héctor Tobar wrote in Performing Arts, "At the heart of this work is the act of listening. Anna meets someone, takes his or her deepest, most heartfelt words, and puts them onstage. In effect, she is telling her audience that the words of these people--a gang member, a corporate executive, a war refugee and others--can carry weight and meaning as important as anything in [playwrights William] Shakespeare or [Eugene] O'Neill." Tobar labeled Smith's highly developed listening "a bold and culturally subversive act."

Embodying Change

"By changing from one person to another, I show that change is possible," Smith told Time. "And the fact that I am a black woman speaking for other ethnicities and for men raises the useful question of who is entitled to speak about what." Los Angeles Reader critic Michael Frym lauded the play in terms that fit Smith's dearest concerns: "It will be difficult for audiences to maintain an 'us'and 'them'mindset after realizing the rich potential of the inclusive 'all.'" And Angela King--whose own words form part of Twilight'; s tapestry of speech--gave perhaps the most compelling testimony to the performance's power: seeing it, she told Newsweek, she "learned about love. I learned about how the riots affected the Koreans. I felt a lot of love for people I couldn't even stand before." This achievement of empathy is the essence of Smith's vision for the theater. As she explained to Vogue, "Basically I'm a spiritual person on a spiritual quest."

For her work on Fires and Twilight, Smith commanded national attention and a great deal of praise. Profiles of her career ran in The New Yorker, People magazine, and the Utne Reader. The Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., awarded her a $100,000 commission to research her next installment of her "On the Road" series: House Arrest, which debuted in 1997. In addition, Smith won a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1996 for the way she has "advanced performance theory and introduced a new way for the theater to reflect, and reflect upon, society," as the directors of the MacArthur Foundation said in awarding her grant. "One of Smith's skills lies in creating works that help those whose viewpoints are diametrically opposed to see the viewpoints of the other side." The following year, in association with the Ford Foundation, Smith founded the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University, a summer program created around her unique approach to how the arts relate to social issues; it ran from 1997 through 2000.

Exploring the American Presidency

In 1995, Smith delved into a project about the American presidency. To create the play, Smith interviewed more than 400 people, from prison inmates to journalists to President Bill Clinton and former presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush, along the presidential campaign trail of 1996 and afterward in Washington, D.C.

Although Smith had researched exhaustively, House Arrest: A Search for the American Character in and around the White House, Past and Present, fell short of critics'expectations. Opening as the Monica Lewinsky scandal swept Washington, House Arrest began as an ensemble play of ever-shifting perspectives on the presidency, because Smith scrambled to add interviews that illuminated the breaking news. Smith honed the play into a final form within a year. This version was better received than the earlier attempts, but House Arrest never quite pleased critics. John Simon summed up the trouble in a review for the New York Metro website: While her earlier plays "zeroed in on dire specific dramas seen from various angles through numerous interviews ... the new work is far more prolix, diffuse, and ultimately self-indulgent."

Smith's experience making House Arrest did result in a unique look at her approach to theater, however. As she worked on House Arrest, she documented her creative process in a book titled Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics, published in 2000. Although House Arrest failed to highlight Smith's genius, her book did. The New York Times Book Review captured the essence of Smith's talent, noting that, "those who truly listen, truly hear."

Smith has carved a powerful place for herself in the theatrical community as a champion of art's ability to comment on social issues. She lectured about her theatrical techniques across the country and became a professor of performance studies in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2000, where she also teaches courses on listening skills at the university's School of Law.

Awards

Selected: Drama-Logue Award, Obie Award, Drama Desk Award, all for Fires in the Mirror, 1992; Antoinette Perry Award, Obie Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, all for Twilight, 1993; MacArthur Award, 1996.

Works

Selected works

• Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines, Random House, 2000.

• Soup for One, 1982.
• Dave, 1993.
• Philadelphia, 1993.
• The American President, 1995.
• The Human Stain, 2003.

• On the Road: A Search for American Character, first produced in California, 1983.
• Aye, Aye, Aye, I'm Integrated, first produced in New York, 1984.
• Fires in the Mirror, first produced in 1992; also broadcast on PBS-TV as part of the "Great Performances" series, 1993.
• Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, first produced in Los Angeles, 1993.
• House Arrest: First Edition, first produced in Washington, D.C., 1997; finalized as House Arrest: A Search for the American Character in and around the White House, Past and Present, 1998.
• Piano, first produced in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.

• All My Children, ABC, 1983.
• Fires in the Mirror, PBS, 1993.
• The West Wing, NBC, 2000--.
• The Practice, ABC, 2000--.
• Presidio Med, 2002--.

• Also author of numerous poems and journalistic articles.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Emerge, April 1993, p. 55.
• Essence, November 1993, p. 60.
• Los Angeles Reader, June 18, 1993.
• Newsweek, June 1, 1992, p. 74; June 28, 1993, p. 62.
• New York, May 3, 1993, p. 68.
• New York Times, May 10, 1992, p. H14; June 10, 1992, pp. C1, C6; August 16, 1992, p. H20; April 23, 1993, pp. B7, C2; April 28, 1993, p. C18.
• People, August 30, 1993, pp. 95-98.
• Performing Arts, June 1993, pp. P1-16.
• Time, May 3, 1993, p. 81; June 28, 1993, p. 73.
• Vogue, April 1993, pp. 224, 238, 242, 250.

• "Anna Deavere Smith's House Arrest, " NewYork Metro, www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/theater/reviews/2637/ (February 10, 2004).
• "Brilliant Careers: Voice of America, Anna Deavere Smith Revolutionized Performing Arts by Bringing Street Realities into the Theater," Salon, www.salon.com/bc/1998/12/cov_08bc.html (February 10, 2004).
• "She, The People," Salon, http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/11/01/smith/index.html (February 10, 2004).

— Simon Glickman and Sara Pendergast

For other persons of the same name, see Anna Smith.

Anna Deavere Smith
Born	Anna Young September 18, 1950 (1950-09-18) (age 58) Baltimore, Maryland
Official website

Anna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950) is a Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-nominated American actress, playwright, and professor. She is currently the artist in residence at the Center for American Progress.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 2.1 Theater 2.2 Film and television 2.3 Teacher 2.4 Author 3 Honors 4 Filmography 5 References 6 External links

Early life

Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Anna (née Young), an elementary school principal, and Deavere Young Smith, a coffee merchant.^[1] Smith is an alumna of the historic Western High School (Baltimore, Maryland). She then attended Beaver College (now Arcadia University), graduating in 1971. She received her M.F.A. in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.

Career

Theater

Smith is best known for her "documentary theatre" style in plays such as Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, both of which featured Smith as the sole performer of multiple and diverse characters and won her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show two years in a row. Fires in the Mirror dealt with the 1991 Crown Heights Riot. Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 dealt with the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Both of these plays were constructed using material solely from interviews and other pieces of the archive. House Arrest in 2000 and Let Me Down Easy in 2008 continued in this style.

Let Me Down Easy, which centered around an exploration of the meaning of the word "grace," debuted at the Long Wharf Theatre in January 2008.^[2] It was also performed at the American Repertory Theater that fall.^[3] and will have its New York City premiere at Second Stage Theatre in October ^[4]. She debuted her latest one-woman play, The Arizona Project in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2008. The piece, which explored "women's relationships to justice and the law," was commissioned by Bruce Ferguson, director of Future Arts Research (F.A.R.), a new artist-driven research program at Arizona State University in Phoenix.^[5]

Earlier in her career, Smith had appeared in a wide range of stage productions, including the role of Mistress Quickly in an Off Broadway production of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor with the Riverside Shakespeare Company, produced by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival, set in New Orleans in post-Civil War America. For the role, Smith transformed herself into a "Cajun voodoo woman" - an indication of the actress's transformational power that would manifest itself in her future work.^[6]

Film and television

Smith has appeared in several films, including Philadelphia and The American President, and has had recurring roles on The West Wing (National Security Advisor Dr. Nancy McNally) and The Practice. Smith will appear as hospital administrator Mrs. Akalitus in the Showtime dark comedy series Nurse Jackie, premiering in June 2009.^[7]

Teacher

Smith delivered a keynote address to the "New Dimensions of Citizenship" conference at Fordham Law School in September 2006

Smith teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. From 1990 to 2000 she was a professor in the drama department at Stanford University. She also teaches at NYU School of Law.

Author

In 2000 Smith published her first book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics. In 2006 she released another, Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.

Honors

As a dramatist Smith was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for Fires in the Mirror which won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show. She was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1994 for Twilight. One for Best Actress and another for Best Play. The play won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance and a Theatre World Award.

Smith was one of the 1996 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant." She also won a 2006 Fletcher Foundation Fellowship for her contribution to civil rights issues as well as a 2008 Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications, Inc.^[8]

She has received honorary degrees from Arcadia University, Bates College, Bryn Mawr College, Smith College, Skidmore College, Macalester College, Occidental College, Pratt Institute, Holy Cross College, Haverford College, Wesleyan University, School of Visual Arts, Northwestern University, Colgate University, California State University Sacramento, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wheelock College, and the Cooper Union.

Filmography

• All My Children 1983 - Hazel
• Philadelphia 1993 - Anthea Burton
• Dave 1993 - Mrs. Travis
• Fires in the Mirror 1993 - Citizens of Crown Heights
• The American President 1995 - Robin McCall
• The Practice 2000 - District Attorney Kate Brunner
• Presidio Med 2002 TV Series - Dr. Letty Jordan
• The West Wing 2000-2004 - National Security Advisor Nancy McNally
• The Human Stain (2003) - Mrs. Silk
• Rent 2005 - Mrs. Jefferson
• The Kingdom (2007) - Deputy National Security Advisor
• Rachel Getting Married (2008) - Carol

References

1. ^ Anna Deavere Smith Biography (1950-)
2. ^ http://www.theatermania.com/connecticut/news/12-2007/anna-deavere-smiths-let-me-down-easy-to-premiere-a_12261.html
3. ^ http://www.amrep.org/2009/
4. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/theater/08anna.html?_r=1&ref=theater
5. ^ http://www.playbill.com/news/article/123017.html
6. ^ "Wives of Windsor [sic] make merry in city parks," by Patricia O'Haire, The New York Daily News, July 26, 1983. For a picture of Smith in the role of Mistress Quickly see Riverside Shakespeare Company.
7. ^ Starr, Michael (June 30, 2008). "Nurse Edie: First Look at Sopranos Star's Dark, New Hospital Comedy". New York Post. NYPost.com. http://www.nypost.com/seven/06302008/tv/nurse_edie_117899.htm. Retrieved on March 8, 2009. 
8. ^ http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=311207

External links

• Anna Deavere Smith at the Internet Movie Database
• Anna Deavere Smith at the Internet Broadway Database
• A thorough list of Anna Deavere Smith's stage, screen and writing credits
• Speaker biography at Royce Carlton Incorporated
• Anna Deavere Smith PBS Now
• TED Talks: Anna Deavere Smith's American character at TED in 2005
• Speech by Anna Deavere Smith at Bates College Commencement 2007

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