Anna Deavere Smith 1950–

Actress, playwright

At a Glance…

Chose Theater to “Cause Peace”

Fires Illuminated Tragedy

The Empowering Effects of Twilight

The Embodiment of Change

Selected writings

Sources

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. Newsweek critic Jack Kroll dubbed her “the most exciting individual in the theater right now” 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.”

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 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 Francis X. Clines of 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’s Ralph Rugoff, 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

At a Glance…

Born September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, MD; daughter of Deavere (a coffee merchant) and Anna (an elementary school principal; maiden name, Young) Smith. Education: Attended Beaver College; received M.F.A, from American Conservatory Theater, 1976.

Actress, playwright and drama teacher, 1978—. Taught acting at Carnegie-Mellon University, 1978-79; New York University, 1983-84; American Conservatory Theater, 1986; University of Southern California; and the National Theater Institute. Visiting artist, Yale University, 1982. Associate professor of drama at Stanford University, 1990—. Stage credits include productions of Horatio, Alma, The Ghost of Spring Street, Mother Courage, Tartuffe, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. Appeared on television series All My Children, 1983, and in “Great Performances” series version of Fires in the Mirror, PBS-TV, 1993; film credits include Soup for One, 1982, Dave, 1993, Philadelphia, 1993.

Addresses: Agent —David Williams, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

Rugoff. “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 a Newsweek interview, 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.

Chose Theater to “Cause Peace”

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’s Rugoff—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.

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 and 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’s Kroll, “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 ineludes 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 said in a Newsweek profile. “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—soundbites 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 noted in a New York Times interview. This nakedness—the yearning, anger, fear, and hope that exist beneath the linguistic strategies of Smith’s interviewees, which she conveys with her own voice and body—is the common humanity that perhaps only the theater can fully depict. During the course of Fires, declared Vogue’s Rugoff, “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

Of course, 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 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 them 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.”

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.”

The Embodiment of 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 Rodney King’s aunt, Angela King—whose own words form part of Twilight’s tapestry of speech—gave perhaps the most compelling testimony of 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.”

Selected writings

Plays

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 at Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 1993.

Also author of the plays A Birthday Card and Aunt Julia’s Shoes; author of poems and journalistic articles.

Sources

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.

—Simon Glickman

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.”