Introduction to Anna Deavere Smith, "Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change"
By Paula Rabinowitz, Professor of English
In 1971, like so many of us from the postwar generation raised in the midst of civil rights struggles and beat poets, Anna Deavere Smith set out to reenact, as a woman, a black woman, Kerouac’s inspirational novel. We were all “on the road” back then, mobile, restless, searching. Ms. Smith has continued her “travels,” her search for herself and more significantly her “Search for American Character.”
Twenty years after she headed west from her Baltimore home, the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, exploded when a car carrying the Lubavitcher Hasidic Rebbe Menachem Schneerson veered onto the sidewalk and killed seven-year-old Gavin Cato, who, with his cousin Angela, had been learning to ride a bike. A few hours later, an Australian Jewish history student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was fatally stabbed by a group of Black youths. The tensions erupting in this densely populated working-class immigrant neighborhood revealed traumas still residing within America’s cities since the Kerner Commission report detailed, in the wake of the 1960s urban uprisings from Watts to Detroit to Newark, the outlines of “two nations: one black, one white.” A year later, across the continent Ms. Smith had been traversing, Los Angeles exploded in cross-racial and cross-ethnic violence after the videotaped brutal beating of Rodney King by four members of the LAPD sparked riots when the officers, later indicted and tried, received a verdict of not guilty by an all-white jury.
These spectacles of police occupation of black neighborhoods, of urban unrest, of widespread rage and despair, became the substance of media exploitation of race, sex and violence, feeding a sense throughout the early 1990s that America was coming unhinged. Remember the names: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, O.J. Simpson, Susan Smith. . . .
Anna Deavere Smith trained her remarkable talents as an actor and listener on the stories of those whose lives were entwined in these social disasters. Her on-going road trip constructs an alternative arena to hear, see, ponder and respond to the ever-changing dimensions of this ungainly nation. Search for American Character—each noun unmodified by either definite or indefinite article, singular, left unpluralized, as if this singularity is the only way such vast diversity can be fathomed. A singularity in topology stands for the black hole where gravity is so intense no light can escape it—the tight space where we must ultimately reside.
As the public sphere collapses, theater forges one zone of public interaction in America. Anna Deavere Smith’s exercises in listening develop from her sense that words express performances of identity. Her ability to listen and to embody, to incarnate, to evoke the other through their words—every one of their words—offers a chance to investigate the moments when language, and thus identity, collapses, breaks apart and opens out into communication. Taking on the responsibility for uttering another’s words, awkward, ungainly, embarrassing as they may be, Anna Deavere Smith’s performances reveal the eloquence locked in the stuttering, rhythmic, chaotic speech of each of us. Listening to a wide variety of people—interviewing as many as four hundred individuals as she researches her unique form of documentary drama—Anna Deavere Smith explores how seemingly random incidents, often repeated daily, can ignite into historic traumas. She attends to the most intimate disclosures, spoken with the full range of emotion, but also to the tackiness and incoherence of people’s speech. These clichés and gaps in narrative become uncannily eloquent and articulate, opening each voice to us, their interlocutors-by-proxy. Ms. Smith gives us them, she gives us herself, and in so doing, she also gives us ourselves.
Attending to the moments when language fails—the hmmmms, the uhs, the likes, you knows, the sighs, the shrugs, the huhs?—she has produced work/ds (my slip of the tongue typo) of profoundly rhetorical power that capture the symptoms of American Character. Like the talking cure that seeks to uncover unconscious traumas behind symptoms, she reveals more than the fullness of discourse, she echoes, even inhabits, the holes in our language, the spaces remaining to be filled and thus makes us face ourselves, our American selves, as a nation of characters.
Playwright, actor, journalist, memoirist, performer, historian, director, Anna Deavere Smith has forged a new kind of public theater. Her books and performances include:
Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and other Identities
Twilight: Los Angeles 1992
Talk to me: Travels within media and politics
She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them:
The MacArthur “Genius” award
Obies for Fires in the Mirror and Twilight, which also won the Drama Desk Award
Two NAACP theater awards
Her work has been performed at New York’s Public Theater, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, on PBS, at Sundance and at venues across the country and around the world.
She has been in residence at Harvard University, where, in 1998, she founded, with the Ford Foundation, The Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue and has taught at Stanford University. She is currently Professor at The Tisch School of the Arts at NYU where she also teaches a course on the “Art of Listening” in the School of Law.
In addition to her solo performances, her roles include National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s West Wing and parts in such films—and note the connections among race, politics, media and the law—as Philadelphia, Dave, The Human Stain, and The American President.
Anna Deavere Smith writes:
“Acting is the furthest thing from lying that I have encountered. It is the furthest thing from make-believe. It is the furthest thing from pretending. It is the most unfake thing there is. Acting is a search for the authentic. It is a search for the authentic by using the fictional as a frame, a house in which the authentic can live. For a moment. Because, yes, indeed, real life inhibits the authentic.”
Please welcome Anna Deavere Smith.
April 16, 2005
Ted Mann Concert Hall