Anna Deavere Smith

By Beatrice Basso
Dramaturg & Literary Manager

I was trained at a time when artists were thought to be "special" people. I don't think we are so special. I think the world around us is incredibly special, incredibly magnificent, in its lightest and darkest and more ordinary muted parts.

- Anna Deavere Smith

Curiosity about the world around her is a mark of the artist Anna Deavere Smith, who has memorably collected and performed the words of real people all over America and abroad in a decades-long series called On the Road: A Search for American Character.

She has created work portraying characters from all walks of life; work stemming from dramatic social events, like the Tony-nominated Twilight: Los Angeles about the L.A. 1992 riots; work about the American presidency in House Arrest; and now Let Me Down Easy, where the epicenter is the human body in its resiliency and vulnerability.

As Smith simply states, "I interview people with a tape recorder and use their verbatim words to make these plays." She then embodies these people (up to 50 per night), respecting their dignity, capturing their essence. She "becomes them."

Smith's accumulated wisdom transpires through the advice from her book Letters to a Young Artist and through the observations of Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines. A selection from her writings will guide us in this brief overview of Smith's journey in search of "the American character" - in search of "doorways into the soul."

Smith's lifelong project started with a large impulse:

"At age 21 I left my family, my hometown [Baltimore], and, with four friends, took off for California. We wanted to make sense, each in our own way, of what to do with all the breakage and promise that had been released through the antiwar movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the beginning of the environmental movement, and the bra-burning, brief as it was, of the women's movement. [. . .]

"My project was to take, at its word, and with both eyes open, and at the same time one eye piercing suspiciously, the movement's promise to give more voice to more people."

Giving "more voice to more people" became her mission, as she discovered that "the most important doorway into the soul of a person is her or his words."

In acting school in San Francisco, she at first feared but then fell in love with Shakespeare. Learning about the rhythmical anomalies in Shakespeare - and how they revealed something about the emotion of the character in that moment - "catapulted me into the quest, the search, that I am now pursuing with the same vigor that I had all those years ago."

A great intuition and some big questions put Smith in motion:

"If I were to go around and listen listen listen to Americans, would I end up with some kind of a composite that would tell me more about America than what is evidently there? How could I get underneath the surfaces?

"I could tell that speech would have to be a resource. Look at the way people can dive and dip and breathe and exclaim and come up with all manner of sounds in the course of saying a word. No one among us talks like anyone else.

"How could I learn more about those powerful moments when people speak their speech, speak a moment in their lives until the music of the moment overpowers the information they are trying to communicate?

"[. . .] I think it's about finding that moment when syntax changes, when grammar breaks down. Those are the moments I should study, if I want to know who a person is."

And then she found a "key," thanks to a fortuitous meeting with a linguist who understood Smith's desire to unleash those unguarded moments.

The linguist suggested three questions bound to make a person oscillate:

• "Have you ever come close to death?"
• "Do you know the circumstance of your birth?"
• "Have you ever been accused of something that you did not do?"

"Those questions became the spine of all my work for the next several years. I had a Panasonic tape recorder that was about eight inches long and five inches wide. I took it to talk to anyone who would talk to me - the lady in the clothing store up the street, the lifeguard at the YMCA pool where I swam, people I met at parties.

"At the time I had a small group of actors who were working with me, people I had met in different schools and studios. I would simply walk up to a person and say, 'I know an actor who looks like you. If you give me an hour of your time, I will invite you to see yourself performed.'

"Somewhere in that hour, I would ask those three questions. The result was a performance that I produced myself in a loft in Lower Manhattan, with 20 actors and 20 real people who came with their friends.

"Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when people spoke a kind of personal music, which left a rhythmic architecture of who they were.

"We are in a moment when technology can support what I am doing. [. . .] I am able to study a person's language and breaths very carefully, because I can record it, and listen to it over and over again. [. . .]"

The highly technical and highly empathetic process of absorbing those words seems to have been magnificently and straightforwardly predicted by her paternal grandfather when he told her: "If you say a word often enough, it becomes you."

Smith has empathized both with the powerless and the powerful - rigorously - since the early '80s, in search for what's hidden, what's behind, what's underneath. She has accumulated, in this journey, the wisdom that comes from real listening, absorption and re-delivery, through her body and mind and spirit, of these people's inner lives.

Should we artists align ourselves with the sane, or shall we take a chance, and walk with our pain, or the pain of others - in order to tell their stories perhaps - to let them know that someone understands?

To let them know that someone could imagine it, that someone could imagine what it would be like to look "wrong" when you have such sweetness and beauty inside, or even the opposite, that you look "right" on the outside and have such dissonance and even torment on the inside?

Empathizing with the outsiders and insiders of our society has allowed Smith not only to find that words are a "doorway into a person's soul" but also a "doorway into the soul of a culture."

Hers is therefore a type of theatre that speaks to the present, to the "civic moment."

"I have tried to create theatre that reflects my time, as I live it." That has often meant exiting comfort zones.

"I am continually leaving safe houses of identity. When you leave the house of what is familiar to you - your family, your race, your social class, your nation, your professional area of expertise - it is not likely that you will find another house that will welcome you with open arms.

"When you leave your safe house, you will end up standing someplace in the road. I would call these places that are without houses crossroads of ambiguity. On the one hand, they are not comfortable places. On the other hand, in them one acquires the freedom to move."

These uncomfortable places have put Smith in touch with difference and with pain, while the freedom to move has kept her engaged and ultimately hopeful.

"It's crucial to keep the faith. Never stop believing. Faith requires discipline and a lot of imagination."

Clearly, Anna Deavere Smith has both in spades, in spades to share.

• Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts - For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind, by Anna Deavere Smith, New York: Anchor Books, 2006.
• Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines, by Anna Deavere Smith, New York: Random House, 2000.