Critics credit the actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith with inventing a new form of socially conscious theater. She becomes, through uncanny mimicry, people she has interviewed. Over the past 40 years, the 66-year-old professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts has won a MacArthur grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and other honors for her one-woman productions made up of interviews on a single event or theme — riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles, the health-care system, Washington’s political culture. Arizona State, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale are among the universities that have commissioned her projects on race, gender, diversity, and listening. You might also know her from roles in films including The American Presidentor TV series like The West Wing.
Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for less than $10/month.
Don’t have an account? Sign up now.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
If you need assistance, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
Christopher Gregory, The New York Times, Redux
Critics credit the actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith with inventing a new form of socially conscious theater. She becomes, through uncanny mimicry, people she has interviewed. Over the past 40 years, the 66-year-old professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts has won a MacArthur grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and other honors for her one-woman productions made up of interviews on a single event or theme — riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles, the health-care system, Washington’s political culture. Arizona State, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale are among the universities that have commissioned her projects on race, gender, diversity, and listening. You might also know her from roles in films including The American Presidentor TV series like The West Wing.
Delivering the 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture, Ms. Smith cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s “inescapable network of mutuality": “Recognizing our interconnectedness in today’s society may seem difficult,” she said, “but we could muster the courage to work for it.”
Her new work, Notes From the Field, now playing at Second Stage Theatre in New York, concerns the school-to-prison pipeline, in which disadvantaged children disproportionately become incarcerated adults. Smith selected 18 monologues from some 250 interviews, and during roughly two hours on stage, she becomes a student, an inmate, a congressman, a nonprofit director, protesters, a pastor, a principal, and more. A central theme of the show is that America needs to make a much greater investment in its children. The evening ends on a bittersweet, hopeful note, with her rendering of Rep. John Lewis recounting moments of forgiveness and grace.
The Chronicle spoke with Ms. Smith about higher education’s social responsibility, her teaching methods, and the national mood.
ADVERTISEMENT
What responsibility, and what capability, might higher education have in disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline?
What I’ve learned is there’s a school-to-prison pipeline, but there’s also a prison-to-college pipeline. At the beginning of the second act, there’s a woman, Denise Dodson, who is incarcerated at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. She is part of Goucher College’s Prison Education Partnership. Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at CUNY, has been at the forefront of thinking about ways of making college available inside correctional institutions.
The other way that colleges and universities are implicated, of course, is that people don’t make it that far. Many colleges understand how deeply they have to reach into communities and how early in the process they have to make themselves visible. When Ruth Simmons was president of Brown, she talked about her commitment to reaching deeply into the communities of Providence. A lot of people don’t even know what college is.
Turn off the TV, turn off the computer, take the ear buds out of your ears, and turn to the person standing next to you, wherever you are.
Colleges can be a lot more aggressive in the way they make themselves present, to be the tent pole for what education is all about. Linda Darling-Hammond had a school in East Palo Alto with a relationship to Stanford. I’m sure that project is not the only one like that. In the same way colleges look for gifted and talented students when they’re very young, they should look for vulnerable students, and should think about ways to disrupt the bad pipeline.
Colleges have an opportunity to be very proactive. I’ll tell you one way that they already are, and that’s in sports. Those looking for great basketball players search far and wide, get very involved in young people’s lives way before they’ve thought about college. Teams have an incentive to find the most talented athletes. Colleges need to learn from them how to find the most talented everything else.
ADVERTISEMENT
You’ve spoken of your activism as an African-American student in the late 1960s and early ’70s at what is nowArcadia University,leading to changes in the curriculum and the hiring of the first African-American professor. What do you think of college activism today?
The death of Martin Luther King was a galvanizing moment for the seven African-American women in my class. We did that together.
I’ll cite Pedro Noguera, the NYU sociologist and professor of education. Two years ago, when I interviewed him, he felt there was more potential in high-school students for activism. That’s because college students have so much at stake right now. It’s so expensive to go to school, there are a lot of pressures on them, they’re very busy.
But that was before Black Lives Matter had the type of presence that it has right now. And of course we saw a lot of activism on a variety of college campuses last year. Colleges have always been a site for potential activism. Why shouldn’t they be? They really are where people are not just learning a profession but, in the best circumstances, have an opportunity to think about their values, what their moral core is.
Who were your most important mentors?
ADVERTISEMENT
My college English-literature teacher, Helen Buttel, and my German teacher, Helene Cohan. They both had a sense of humor and a way about them that invited me into discussion. They helped counteract the alienation I felt in a predominately white school.
If you were putting together a performance about the state of today’s campuses, what might be the central themes?
One would be money, the cost of college, what people had to do to get there. And then why they want to be there.
Also, in an environment where they don’t have to be in a clique or a clan or a tribe, why do they often end up that way? Why do they come to a place where they have a chance to deal with all kinds of people and all kinds of ideas, and want to be with people just like them? Colleges have an opportunity to disrupt that, but they don’t.
The other thing I might like to ask every student that I talk to and every professor is: Are you learning anything about love here? Is your idea of love narrowing down to a practical matter of who you’re going to bed with or marrying or living with? Or is your idea of love expanding so that you’re able to love more things about the world and make love happen around you? You have a chance in any discipline to think about love as an opportunity to develop a moral core that’s going to create health, well-being, and generosity around you.
ADVERTISEMENT
For interviewing techniques, are there models you bring to your students?
I’m interested in personal narrative, so I’ve been teaching something called the broad jump to the other. They first make a performance piece about themselves, and then they switch and do somebody else in the class. One year I taught a Lebanese woman and an Israeli woman, and I had them switch. At the end they each said a version of, Thank you for giving me a chance to do this, because before I didn’t really understand that person, that humanity.
I try to teach how much you have to pay attention if you really consider yourself an empathic person. It’s not just, Oh, being nice.
You have a rare if not unique combination of research and acting skills. How do you cultivate that in your students while steering them away from plain old mimicry, which could veer into offensive caricature?
There’s a lot in my teaching now that is about creating a community of responsibility in that room. I tell students on the first day of class that I’ll be talking a lot in the first few sessions, but as we move on, they’ll be talking more and more, and I’ll be talking less. What I try to do is make a self-sufficient community of people who are responsible to one another, who fall in love with one another. That environment of care is where they are performing one another, so they are certainly very careful about what they present. And each person who is performing is going to be performed, too, so that ups the ante.
ADVERTISEMENT
They begin with trepidation, but there’s even somebody in the class called the pastor whose job it is to make sure that everybody’s OK. Because some of the work is very deep and very personal.
If you were giving a workshop on listening and empathy in the wake of the election, what would be the first exercises?
I’d say turn off the TV, turn off the computer, take the ear buds out of your ears, and turn to the person standing next to you, wherever you are.
Empathy is not just the soft stuff. It helps you know who you are talking to or working with — it can even help you understand adversaries. Any warrior knows what is on the other side. By keeping ourselves in tribes, we fail to work the muscle that would introduce us to more of the world, and, I suppose, more truth with a small “t.”
What are your forthcoming projects? Is there a show to be done on a divided America? Or have we seen too much of that show already?
ADVERTISEMENT
There are some things that really require hindsight. I wrote a play called House Arrest about Washington. I interviewed over 500 people. I also wrote a book called Talk to Me, about how the Washington that I saw in 1996 was very cut off from the rest of America. It didn’t matter what political party you were in. The media were very cut off from the rest of America too. What I saw then, that chicken has come home to roost.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.