Celebrating the birth & legacy of

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

“Each person has a literature inside them.”

— Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author.  In an era when anyone with a computer connection can broadcast their own life story for everyone or no one to consider, Anna Deavere Smith continues to shock and dazzle audiences with her stage portraits of the humble and the great. A hybrid artist if ever there was one, she collects stories through recorded interviews and then personally portrays the tellers on stage, in curated displays of American character organized around pressing questions of our time.

Smith was born on September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland, the first of five children to an elementary school educator, and a coffee merchant.  In middle school, she discovered a gift for mimicry; in college, an interest in social justice.  

She received an MFA in acting from the American Conservatory Theater.  A transformative moment came early in her training, when Smith encountered Shakespeare. Like countless actors, she was afraid of the Bard, afraid of giving voice to “that thick, antiquated language that seemed totally irrelevant to the world around me.” Her teacher instructed the class to “take fourteen lines of Shakespeare and say it over and over again to see what happened.” Smith picked a speech from Richard II in which Queen Margaret bitterly laments the devastation wrought by Richard, “That foul defacer of God’s handiwork, / That excellent grand tyrant of the earth.”

Smith, who had once thought of becoming a linguist, was affected by the exercise, especially its simple, repetitive focus on saying the words.  She came to view language itself as the great window onto character. And repeating the language became central to her process. On this point, she often quotes her grandfather, who told her as a little girl that “if you say a word often enough, it becomes you.”

“Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn't come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing.”

— Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist

Smith worked several odd jobs in offices and restaurants after she left the conservatory. At KLM Airlines, she worked in the complaint department, handling correspondence from dissatisfied customers.  Their stories made Smith wonder: “If I were to go around and listen listen listen to Americans, would I end up with some kind of a composite that would tell me more about America than is evidently there?”

She used this idea to create a "documentary theatre" style, also called verbatim theatre.   Her play Fires in the Mirror (1992) dealt with the 1991 Crown Heights riot. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992  (which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 1994) dealt with the 1992 Los Angeles riots after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, in events captured on tape.  Both plays featured Smith as the sole performer of multiple and diverse characters, based on interviews she had conducted with numerous residents and commentators in the two cities where riots had taken place. For these works, she won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show two years in a row. She interviewed more than 100 people as part of her creation of Fires in the Mirror and she interviewed some 300 people as part of her research for creating Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.

Fires in the Mirror was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1994 for Best Actress and Best Play. 

Her other plays include House Arrest and Piano (2000), Let Me Down Easy (2008), On Grace (2012) and Notes from the Field(2016).  Smith is also the author of two books:  Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (2001) and Letters to a Young Artist (2006).

As an actress, Smith has also appeared in numerous television series including ABC’s  For the People, Black-ish, as Gloria Akalitus on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, and the National Security Advisor on NBC’s The West Wing. Films include The American President, Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, Dave, Rent and The Human Stain.

In 2012, President Obama awarded her the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal. She was the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts. In 2015, she was named the Jefferson Lecturer, the nation’s highest honor in the humanities. Smith is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University, where she is also University Professor at Tisch School of the Arts.

“Her plays confirm: that a whole world of thought and emotion can be made, through art, to live and accrue new meanings in just one person’s mind and body.”

—Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker Magazine, August 24, 2020

Portions of this biography were taken from
National Endowment for the Humanities

Learn more about ANNA DEAVERE SMITH:
 

✨ Next week… ✨

We will celebrate the birth of Anna Deavere Smith with a performance of a monologue from one of her works by Actors Co-op company member, Crystal Jackson!

These performances will be delivered to you for safe viewing at home, via email. 

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