Women in the news
"Creative Reality: Anna Deveare-Smith" by Marcia Stepanek
Anna Deveare-Smith doesn't do traditional playwriting. Rather than create characters from her imagination, she finds real people on the streets. Then she listens hard to what they have to say. "I look for the poem that a person has" she told AWC-DC on recent afternoon, leaning forward in her chair, less an effort to make a point than to follow her thought toward her listener. "So when I am conducting an interview, I am waiting for the rest of a person's language to move out of the way for this poem to come forward."
Smith doesn't write so much as interview. Using a tape-recorder, she collects the words of hundreds of people-gang members, middle-class housewives, Korean shop-owners, cops, news correspondents, professional spin-meisters, crack addicts, painters and socialites. She then performs them all, recreating their voices verbatim, leaving all tics and tremors intact. Every "um" and "ahh" of a person's speech is committed to memory, then to stage.
Said the Boston Globe: "Anna Deavere Smith not only reveals the content of their characters but the substance of their souls."
The result is riveting: A collage of voices. A one-woman show. A nonfiction story of an America divided, by words as much as by race, class, religion and gender.
"Smith has done a great thing," a New Yorker profile of her said. "She has gone into this noisy republic and, combining the editorial skill of the biographer and the precision of the mimic, has brought onto the American stage the voices of the unheard."
Smith's blend of theatrical art, journalism and social commentary is so unique that it has created a new form of theater, and won Smith a $280,000 "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation last year. Her work generates heated discussions wherever she performs it. Her subject-matter is always controversial, and audiences rarely stay quiet.
In "Fires in the Mirror" her 1991 play about the riots between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, there was Anna, the brother of a young Lubavitcher, in Hasidic hat and Australian accent, not a caricature but a character, dignified and distraught: "When my brother was stabbed four times, each and every American was stabbed four times."
In "Twilight: Los Angeles," her 1994 play about the Los Angeles riots, there was Anna as the former L.A. police commissioner in the aftermath of the riots triggered by the beating of Rodney King: "Suddenly, I am the symbol of police oppression, and it's a tough thing to deal with, a very tough thing."
In a cafe over lunch, talking to a reporter about the poetry of simple expression, there was Anna, suddenly becoming a small-town southern preacher, talking about Daniel in the lion's den and the unfathomable power of the deity. "Gawd," she drawls, her voice low and quivering with quiet intensity, "Gawd can heal you in an instant of a minute." It is that phrase "an instant of a minute" that fascinates her.
"There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say," Smith says. "They didn't hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it's gorgeous."
This month, Anna is here in Washington-America's largest natural public theater-for the world debut of her newest play, "House Arrest: First Edition." The play, which explores the relationship between the press and the presidency (our chapter event for November) is the third in a series of Smith's performance pieces called "On the Road: A Search for the American Character."
Unlike Fires and Twilight, in which Smith performed all of the voices and characters of her interviewees, 15 actors will perform House Arrest-about those who have power and those who observe it. Each will perform the words and gestures of a variety of real-life news correspondents, politicians and others who Smith interviewed while she worked as a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine covering the 1996 presidential campaign.
"I wanted to understand what Vietnam and Watergate-what that earthquake-did to the press," Smith told the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper earlier this year. "Has the press scrutinized the presidency more since then? I'm fascinated with the idea that leadership hasn't changed in terms of power, but the media has gained power. I wanted to find out if that, in fact, was true."
When she began her On the Road series in the early 1980s, "my simple introduction to anyone I interviewed was, "If you give me an hour of your time, I'll invite you to see yourself performed."
"At that time," she writes in the introduction to the published text of Fires, "I was not as interested in performance or in social commentary as I was in experimenting with language and its relationship to character."
The creative power of Smith's work, critics say, is in its ability to choose the words and the people through which to faithfully reflect an America "that doesn't appear on the evening news."
"Words have always held a particular power for me," Smith says. "I remember leafing through a book of Native American poems one morning when I was studying acting, while I was waiting for my Shakespeare class to begin," she writes in the introduction to Fires. "I was struck by a phrase from the preface, 'The word, above all, is truly magical, not only by its meaning but by its artful manipulation.' This quote, which I added to my journal, reminded me of something my grandfather had told me when I was a girl growing up in Baltimore: 'If you say a word often enough, it becomes you."'
"...I started thinking that if I listened carefully to people's words, and particularly to their rhythms, that I could use language to learn about my own time. If I could find a way to really inhabit the words of those around me...I could learn about the spirit, the imagination and the challenges of my own time, firsthand."
"...The body has a memory, just as the mind does. The act of speech is a physical act. It is powerful enough that it can create, with the rest of the body, a kind of cooperative dance. That dance is a sketch of something that is inside a person and not fully revealed by the words alone.
"I came to realize that if I were able to record part of the dance-that is, the spoken part-and reenact it, the rest of the body would follow. I could then create the illusion of being another person by reenacting something they had said as they had said it. Using my grandfather's idea that if I said a word often enough it would become me, the reenactment, or the reiteration of a person's words, would also teach me about that person."
Smith's On the Road project took shape, she says, "during a time that many institutions were going through identity shifts with regard to gender and ethnicity."
Those shifts, she says, continue. "In America, identity is always being negotiated," Smith says. "...I think in America there is difficulty people have in talking about race and talking about difference. This difficulty goes across race, class and political lines ... This means to me that we do not have a language that serves us as a group. I think there is a gap between those who are heard and those who speak in America.
"...My sense is that the American character lives not in one place or the other but in the gaps between the places, and in our struggle to be together in our differences. It lives not in what has been fully articulated but in what is in the process of being articulated, not in the smooth-sounding words but in the very moment that the smooth-sounding words fail us. It is alive right now. We might not like what we see, but in order to change it, we have to see it clearly."
In addition to her roles as actor and playwright, Ms. Smith teaches at Stanford University, where she is Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts. Ms. Smith is also the Director of the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she now lives in San Francisco, California. Her agent is Royce-Carlton Agency, 212-355-7700. Her publisher is Randon House, and her book tour agent there is Liz Fogerty, 212-572-2693.
