Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy at the American Repertory Theatre
September 12 - October 11, 2008.
What a pleasure and a privilege to see this wonderful artist-ethnographer in action in her latest play. Deavere Smith has made a career out of conducting hundreds of interviews on a particular topic or in a particular location. She then painstakingly recreates the physical and vocal qualities and mannerisims of her interviewees into one-woman productions that offer 25 or more characters apiece. She is best-known for her shows Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror, both of which dealt head-on with racial unrest and injustice in American society.
This new play is somewhat of a departure for Deavere Smith as she set out to question more philosophical questions around mortality, embodiment and a concept that became central to this self-described "play in evolution"; the concept of grace. What is it? Where does it come from? How do we experience it? These are the questions that drove Deavere Smith's 300 (!)interviews with a wide range of subjects: priests, rabbis, Buddhist monks and imams (not surprisingly); a jockey and horse trainer (more surprisingly); survivors of the Rwandan genocide; musicians; scholars and philosophers; great opera diva Jessye Norman; former Texan governor and cancer patient Ann Richards. All are fully rendered in monologues that circle around her key theme, offering a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives and stories.
Deavere Smith has a powerful stage presence that commands an unwavering attention over the two and a half hour show. She speaks directly to the audience (sometimes, briefly, as herself) as she portrays each interview subject, backed by an effective set design of a rough and uneven corrugated iron wall that opens onto a screen featuring images and an occasional video to support the action or establish a setting. Stage hands bring on and take off costume pieces and props for Deavere Smith, but this is never an attempt to 'fool' the audience; everything happens in full view. And, unless she puts on shoes to help her establish a character more fully, Deavere Smith is barefoot, an aesthetic choice that resonated with me around the choruses of ancient Greece bearing witness to great events as they dance barefoot in a circle together. There is that deep sense of participating in a more ritual-ized form of theatre when watching Deavere Smith at work.
She is a fascinating actor, and not because she is that good a one. She has a powerful voice and all the technical skills necessary, but I did not experience her work as that of an actor with the capability to seemingly morph into other people. For me, there was always something of the actor in every character, as accurate and most often believable I found each incarnation to be. Is this a conscious Brechtian alienation effect that Deavere Smith is employing, reminding her audience that everything is constructed, false, that the truth of this experience really lay in her original encounters with these participants, that anything else is a mere representation? Perhaps, and that is one way to read her work. However, as a researcher myself, I read a sister-researcher at work here, using her art form of theatre to best represent the lived experiences of her interviewees. The fine attention to detail I saw in her representations tells me she studied the interview tapes in depth, and called upon the actor's skill of memory-recall, in order to include each person's vocal mannerisms, their hesitations, tics, pauses, laughs, silences. In this way, her ethnographic portraits are far more accurate and convincing than a researcher limited to written forms is able to be. Any graduate student in the social sciences or humanities should see a Deavere Smith show, preferably live, but her earlier shows are readily available on DVD. She has a lot to teach about the fine art of researching other people.
As for the show itself? It definitely is "a play in evolution" as I felt the first act was outstanding and the second somewhat of a letdown. Deavere Smith appears to have fallen into the easy research trap of trying to cram too much data into the final report! Although she has limited her selection to 30 of the 300 interviews, she still seems to be trying to make all the pieces 'fit' together. The problem I saw in Act Two lies in a section that deals with the medical system and features interviews with doctors and patients around what's both right and wrong with the ways we care for our own and other peoples' bodies in crisis. While I enjoyed this section of the show, I did feel that we began to move somewhat farther away from the central theme of grace that was so well established and explored in Act One. It felt to me that this section might be the beginning of another show on this topic, but where it sits right now it leads me away from a topic with which I was fully engaged and wanted more.
Interestingly, in a post-show panel featuring Deavere Smith, chaired by Harvard's Homi Babha, one panelist mentioned (quite rightly) that if she wanted to keep centred on the theme of grace while looking at the medical system, Deavere Smith would do well to interview nurses. And hospice workers, I might add! So maybe that is how this play will keep evolving, maybe not.
The memories I will carry with me as my archive of this performance (a concept from performance theorist Herbert Blau in his book The Audience) is of her recreating testimony from African subjects, particularly those who lived through the Rwandan genocide, survivors and perpetrators both. When a young girl, now a college student in the US, speaks through Deavere Smith about her ability to forgive those who murdered her family to "let them go", I am given the gift of understanding grace in a whole new way. For this and many other dramatic insights along the way--the death of a horse, the beauty of a garden, the power of art to lift and transform suffering--I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have been graced for a short time in the presence of a great American artist.
