The Woman of 1000 Faces
On September 18, 1950, the trailblazer for one-woman shows, vignettes, documentary theatre, political theatre, and mimicry came into the world. Born as a 'DMV official' from Baltimore, an intentionally segregated town, she came across two opposite experiences that played a part in her upbringing as a young black girl. They were that of black and white people. Due to factories closing, as well as redlining and racism, white flight took place in the 60s and 70s, which was followed by an influx of waves from black flight. The polarity between these two demographics she witnessed had part in her attending a black elementary school then a predominantly white high school. Through this, she was able to assess the differences that each group brought. However there was one alikeness that indirectly made her struggle the most. Everyone was excluded from each other based on social class & race. This tribalism, as she calls it, is something that has always bothered her deeply, which would, in turn, drive her to be a linguist so that within this insurmountable problem, discourse would be able to happen. Her name is Anna Deavere Smith.
The academic record of hers is quite impressive. Pursuing the continued desire for discussion and language, which she considers to be the window to the soul and her most passionate interest, she accomplished a B.A. in Linguistics at Beaver College in 1971. A part of a small demographic of black students at Beaver College, amid her stay, she helped form a black student union, which led to alterations to the curriculum and the hiring of its first black professor. After college is when she developed an interest in theatre, in which she came upon an acting class by accident and said, “Oh my goodness, everyone is changing.” Fascinated by the possibility of this type of magical transformation as part of a larger mosaic of social change, she went on to attain an M.F.A in Acting at the American Conservatory Theatre in 1977. Her professor, Wynn Handman, would assign the class scenes and ask the students to create monologues out of them. This opportunity sowed the seeds of interest for examining things in detail, then stepping back to create an entire picture. In that same year, she also spent six months in New York as a Ford Foundation artist-in-residence. From then on, she set forth to become whom we know as “the ultimate impressionist who does people's souls" (David Richards, New York Times). Not to mention, a decade ago, she achieved the Doctorate of Humane Letters from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The dimensions from each study of interest that she's dedicated herself to are ingredients prominent in her work encompassing in its entirety: speaking in different ways through acting, simultaneously bringing about conversations of social change. This tribrid is documentary theatre.
Her desire to tell and hear a story came from a Ms. Johnson, her neighbor whom she often asked to tell her the same stories over and over again. This experience, along with her talent of imitation, would become a wonder that would be her commitment to theatre. She began to set the standard for documentary theater in the early 1990s. On hard to speak subjects, people usually tread carefully or prefer not to speak on them at all for how tender they are. But a devotee to this genre of theatre, as Anna is, walks right into this vortex and speaks boldly with no reservations. She extracts the private things, pierces it to us, then gets right to the heart of the matter. An additional inspiration of hers consists of Studs Terkel’s Working, which embodied interviews with the citizens of Chicago and was adapted to become a Broadway musical.
Her first addition to her repertoire was Fires in the Mirror, a one-woman show about those who experienced and observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots. A period of calamity, with 190 injuries, 129 arrests, & $1 million of property damage, struck Anna Deavere Smith with inspiration, and I believe, in an unfortunate and nostalgic way due to her childhood experiences. The play's consisted of monologues taken directly from interviews that Smith conducted with members of the black and Hasidic Jewish communities connected to the event.
She applied the same concept with Twilight Los Angeles 1992, focusing on the lasting impact of the L.A riots commenced by the 1991 Rodney King beating, following the violent aftermath of the 1992 verdict. Smith spent nine months conducting more than 200 interviews with people of all ages, ethnicities, races, social status, and power levels about the 1992 Los Angeles riots, including LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and a nameless juror. She secured many accolades for this ensemble: two nominations for a Tony, an NAACP Image Award, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and an OBIE Award, to name a few.
Several years later, other productions like House Arrest: A Search for the American Character in and Around the White House, Let Me Down Easy, and Notes From the Field followed, which centered around America’s issues surrounding race, identity, and community. Well, apparently all but the first one. It earned a harsher critique than her other performances. Most reviews expressed it as her most trivial piece. Her enthusiasts expected her to be drawn in by things that happen in smaller communities that aren't necessarily a part of mainstream knowledge. Since the show surrounds the scandal of Bill Clinton, its recognition by The New York Times, Variety, and Baltimore Sun described it as a minuscule topic in comparison to the heavier subjects her audiences expect from her. The count of interviewees for this performance is more than 400. She still tweaks its construction with the determination that there would be a turnaround with its reception. The second mentioned production examines the miracle of human resilience through the spectacles of the national debate on healthcare and wellness. After collecting interviews with over 300 people on three continents, Smith creates a display of only 20 people, both well known and unknown. Lastly, Notes From the Field iruses on something important that some see as theoretical. She lays out the personal accounts of students, parents, teachers, faculty, and administrators that witnessed America’s school-to-prison pipeline in work while investigating a justice system that pushes minors deriving from poor communities from school into incarceration. Around the country, 250 participants spoke with her. From that, the number narrowed down to 18 people whom she chose as portraits. I mention these works to show an array of her devotion and the impact of it. Smith dares not to erase the “uh’s” and “um’s” from anyone's speech. She includes every bit because she believes identity lives in the actual making of language, in the present sounds that a person is making, and how they're making those sounds. Smith believes our true character, our humanity, that emerges when we abandon formal language for the messy patterns of the spontaneity our speech presents. This comprehension is what makes her a tour de force in each role she takes on, seamlessly switching in characterization with astonishing fluidity with a striking passion behind it. It’s the reason for her mastering documentary theatre.
It’s also why she has a great list of professorial background. She taught at NYU Tisch School of the Arts for Performance Studies and courses on listening skills at the NYU School of Law. She's acknowledged by Harvard University for founding its Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue in 1997. She also shared her time as an acting teacher and visiting artist at Yale University and the National Theater Institute and returned to the American Conservatory Theater as a master teacher of acting, then joined the staff of the theater department at the University of Southern California and Stanford University. Smith also taught drama at Carnegie Mellon while exploring methods for her actors to learn her formula of creating characters by studying real people by engaging in dialogue with them in a journalistic manner, and use that as archival material to create a performance. Motivated by the positive outcomes of her methods, she launched her ongoing project, On the Road: A Search for American Character. Anna Deavere Smith also set into motion her YoungArts Master Class Program, where she mentors young actors and where one can see the reason why so many prestigious universities want her as a professor or part of their administration. She’s deeply admired for her famously gifted ability to submerge herself into wearing 1000 faces. The young actors admire her as a teacher, blessed to be in the presence of and learn from. Since so many people seek out her knowledge and advice, she published Letters to A Young Artist, an inspirational guide of a skillset and thought processes one should possess as a creative.
When recent endeavors of hers are in question, you’ll find out that she began a playwright’s residency performing an extension of her two famous plays Fires and Twilight at the Signature Theatre, in New York. It started in 2019 and would end this year, but of course, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted its continuance. Interestingly, she staged it with other actors instead of herself, something she hasn't done since House Arrest with 12 actors. She also partook in a 3-part SigSpace Summit series where she invited guests to have a discourse about Black Lives Matter, the protests of George Floyd, and connected it to those of Rodney King, thoroughly addressed in Twilight. Looking back on all of the accomplishments of Anna Deavere Smith will truly leave one astonished. On top of her outstanding efforts as a playwright, professor, author, and performer, people know her for television and film appearances like: Nurse Jackie, Blackish, Philadelphia, and Rent. I’ve realized that within all that this solo performance pioneer does, she makes sure to perpetuate and apply her late grandfather’s words, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.”
Works Cited
https://www.signaturetheatre.org/shows-and-events/Productions/2019-2020/Fires-in-the-Mirror.aspx
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13228.Anna_Deavere_Smith
Richards, David. Review/Theater: Twilight -- Los Angeles, 1992; A One-Woman Riot Conjures Character Amid the Chaos. 24 Mar. 1994,
www.nytimes.com/1994/03/24/theater/review-theater-twilight-los-angeles-1992-one-woman-riot-conjures-character-amid.html.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Deavere-Smith
https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/anna-deavere-smith-biography
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113771426
Gilbert, Sophie. Theater Review: Let Me Down Easy. 10 Jan. 2011, www.washingtonian.com/2011/01/10/theater-review-let-me-down-easy/.
http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/anna-deavere-smith/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0807332/bio
http://www.mikewileyproductions.com/pdfs/plays/Documentary%20Theatre.pdf
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-voices-of-anna-deavere-smith
https://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=4747
