Acclaimed Playwright Visits Pomona
By Peter Skipper
Contributing Writer

Playwright, author, and actress, Anna Deavere Smith’s arrival on Pomona’s campus this upcoming weekend garnered an immediate response from the student body. “Who?” exclaimed one friend of mine recently—“Oh yeah, I love her Fall Fashion Lineup.

Confusion aside, Smith’s arrival promises to be a watershed event for Big Bridges Auditorium, whose recent engagements (last year’s SCAMFest comes to mind) have generally lain somewhere in the vicinity of mediocre.

Smith is a tenured Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, but that is only her day job. In addition to her teaching responsibilities she is an accomplished actress, with roles in film (Philadelphia, Dave) and television (The West Wing, and CBS’ new drama Presidio Med). And she is an award-winning playwright—her piece Fires in the Mirror was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

It is her theater work for which Smith has gained the most critical acclaim. For the past two decades she has been contributing scripts to a growing anthology, which she calls On the Road: the Search for American Character. The majority of the plays are based on real-life interviews that Smith conducts with an assortment of people (each with different and often conflicting perspectives) regarding contemporary American social issues. For instance, Fires in the Mirror is a study of the Crown Heights Riots in Brooklyn eleven years ago. Smith conducted hundreds of interviews to complete the project, and performs about 20 of them to construct the play. She embodies the dress and speech patterns of her interviewees, and uses their words as a vessel to understand both the plot and the tragedy behind it. The result, however, should not be mistaken for mere mimicry: The New York Times has called her “the ultimate impressionist: she does people’s souls.” Other critics have chimed in with equally glowing praise: Newsweek’s Jack Kroll called her “the most exciting individual in American theater right now” and called Twilight [Smith’s drama about LA’s Rodney King riots] “an American masterpiece.” The New Yorker called the show “one of the most sophisticated dialogues about race in contemporary America.” And Frank Rich of The New York Times even hazarded “she may be that rare actor who actually should be encouraged to run for public office."

Now before this article degenerates into an infomercial, Smith’s approach to theater (which is also her approach to public speaking engagements, like the one this Saturday) should be discussed. She claims to have gotten her first inspiration for a theater through interviews from, of all places, The Tonight Show. As she explains:

There was Sophia Loren as a guest and Johnny Carson trying to keep her funny. But she wouldn’t do it. This was 1979 and she was confessing this serious, sad, angry story about her fake jewels being stolen in a Dallas hotel. Nobody laughed. The band stopped playing. And then she was followed by Joan Rivers, who knows the talk show rhythm like nobody else, and she worked the whole audience into a kind of hysteria... I’d been watching the show all my life but it was like I’d never seen it. So I suddenly thought: “This show is about America.” I didn’t know why, but it really was about America. And then I just started watching interview shows on television, looking for the moments when language failed and character emerged.

The interviews were a medium for understanding character—“I was interested in what appeared to be a tug of war between what the guests wanted to reveal about themselves and what the host wanted to seem to reveal.” The players were using dialogue to hide themselves, but in fact their characters were inevitably opened and exposed the longer they continued to speak. This tension between hiding and revealing is focused explicitly in dialogue. In explaining her dramatic work, Smith asserts that character exists in language. In fact, she claims, “Character is the struggle to put things into language.”

Ms. Smith directs her explorations of character and language toward social issues, most often race relations in the United States. Why race? She explains:

Because of the kind of work I do, I’m constantly talking about race. But when I go to my gym, which is the San Francisco Bay Club, these people don’t ever look like they talk about race. On the other hand, there’s always this incredible discussion. It is an incredibly important part of academia, for example. And so I hear a lot of noise and music and discussion on the one hand, but I’m very aware of the silence on the other.

Her plays have helped root out the silences on American race relations, but Smith is hesitant to impute too much therapeutic power to her work in the realm of social problems. As she explains:

Sometimes there is the expectation that inasmuch as I am doing “social dramas,” I am looking for solutions to social problems. In fact, though, I am looking at the process of becoming something. It is not a result. It is not an answer. It is not a solution. I am first looking for the humanness inside the problems, or the crises. The spoken word is evidence of that humanness. The aliveness of the theater is also an affirmation of that humanness. Perhaps the solutions lie in part in the humanness of the audience, and in the potential for dialogue and action after the curtain goes down.
Word.

Ms. Smith will be speaking to Pomona on Saturday, September 28 at 7 p.m. in Big Bridges Auditorium. The title of her talk is “Snapshots: Glimpses of America In Change”. She plans to explore how issues of race, class and gender have shaped and are transforming the American character, and she will include selections from her award-winning plays in her performance. A book-signing will commence immediately after the talk.