"Actress Anna Deavere Smith
Listens for Our Differences"
Published on the front page of Northwest Asian
Weekly, Seattle
Playwright and actress Anna Deavere
Smith has made a career out of listening to people—especially those radically
different from her. That alone might set her apart in
today’s America, where sound bites rule the airwaves. But Smith, who gave a riveting
presentation on April 16 at the University of Washington’s Meany Theater, listens
to everyone—from white LA policemen to Korean shopkeepers to black gang
members.
Then she crafts plays that bring
her subjects’ words, accents and mannerisms to the stage verbatim, presenting
their perspectives sometimes one after another, sometimes interspersed with
each other, in a unique and compelling blend of journalism and theater.
Smith’s best-known plays, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights,
Brooklyn, and Other Identities and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,
each focus on a single American cataclysm of race. Fires explores the
Jewish-black confrontations that ensued in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 after a black boy was killed by a Hasidic
Jewish driver. Twilight investigates the riots in LA following
the 1992 acquittal of four white policemen accused of brutally beating a black
man, Rodney King.
Both plays present the perspectives
of some two dozen participants and onlookers of widely varying ages,
ethnicities and classes—all, in the original productions, portrayed by Smith
herself. (Subsequent productions usually divide the roles among
three to five actors but retain her technique of casting across racial and
gender lines: a young black woman may play LA Police Chief Daryl Gates, for
instance, or a Hispanic actor may play a Hasidic Jew.)
It’s all part of Smith’s quest to
help us hear each other. “America has been based on debate, but now we need
symphonies,” she told the largely youthful UW audience, urging them to learn
“to hear differently, to hear different tones.” She teaches a course called
“The Art of Listening” at New York University, and her groundbreaking
theatrical techniques are taught in drama classes at the UW and across America.
Despite her many
accolades—MacArthur genius grant, Obie and Drama Desk Awards for her plays, a
recurring role on one of America’s most popular television series—Smith, 53, is
breezily unaffected and down to earth.
“How many of you have heard my name
because I’m on The West Wing?” she asked the UW audience shortly after
taking the stage. A smattering of hands were raised, and she nodded
peremptorily. “How many of you have heard of me because I’ve spent my career
working on race relations?” Scores of hands went up, along with cheers and
applause. “Great!” she said, grinning.
Now a San Francisco resident, Smith
sent the audience (and herself, at one point) into paroxyms of laughter with an
“imagined debate” excerpted from her Washington, D.C.–based play House
Arrest. Fascinated by the revelations of a near-definite genetic link
between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ youngest child, Smith juxtaposed
passages from separate interviews she conducted with Jefferson scholar Roger
Kennedy and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, author of a book on Hemings and
Jefferson, interspersing Gordon-Reed’s “Well, that’s crazy!” with Kennedy’s
pronouncements that there was “not a shred, not a shred of evidence” of
Jefferson’s paternity.
“What a different country we would have
if [Hemings] were a part of our mythology, really a part of it,” Smith mused,
“this black woman who was the mother of the children of, you know, Thomas
Jefferson—this great big contradiction.”
As her “feature presentation,”
Smith presented “Shoulder to Shoulder,” an excerpt from a 1960s conversation
between black writer James Baldwin and anthropologist Margaret Mead, in which
Baldwin doggedly insisted on characterizing himself as an exile from America,
despite Mead’s equally dogged protests about the high stakes of disengagement.
“The terms in which my life was
offered to me in my country were completely unacceptable. . . . America has
thrown me out of my country,” Smith-as-Baldwin said, citing the bombing of a
Birmingham church that killed four little black girls just two weeks after
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. “That was the
answer the republic gave” to the speech.
“But you see, I would say that the
republic did not give that answer, because I’m a part of the republic, and I
didn’t give it!” Smith-as-Mead boomed back. “In terms of the colors of our
skin, you represent a course of victimization and suffering and exploitation .
. . and I represent the conquerors.” Despite their different experiences, she
asked, could they not “stand shoulder to shoulder, working for the same
future”? It was essential, she argued, because America needed to change, in
order to safeguard the very fate of the planet.
Smith appeared to share Mead’s
perspective. “I think it’s time for us to move quickly beyond our problem
inside these borders,” she said in introducing the piece, “and see what we have
learned from it that we can apply to the much, much larger problem . . . which
is how on earth the human race is going to make it through. That’s the
race we really need to be worried about.”
One of Smith’s closing vignettes
was “Swallowing the Bitterness,” an excerpt from Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
in which she portrayed a Korean shopkeeper whose store was destroyed in the
LA riots. Smith termed it one of the more complex portraits in the play.
At first composed and controlled,
the shopkeeper’s voice soon became a wail of anguish. “We are completely left
out of this society!” she roared. Unlike blacks, “who didn’t work,” Koreans
didn’t qualify for medical treatment, food stamps, or welfare after the riots,
she said, because they had cars and houses.
“Where do I find justice?” she
asked, recalling how blacks celebrated after the second trial, in which two of
the white police officers were convicted. Blacks “got their rights by
destroying innocent Korean merchants.”
But then her mood changed. “I was
swallowing the bitterness, sitting here alone and watching them. . . . I was
happy for them,” she said. “At least they got something back, OK?” Because
blacks fought and sacrificed for their rights over the last two centuries, she
said, all minorities are better off today.
And yet. “I wish I could be part of
their enjoyment. I wish that I could live together with black people. But after
the riots, there is too much difference. The fire is still there. How you say,
it will . . . ‘ignite’?
“It’s still there,” she said. “It
can burn up—anytime.”
