ctors have no interest in appearing to be dispassionate or disconnected”, Anna Devere Smith once said, “my goal has been to find American character in the ways that
 people speak”.

In a lecture demonstration about her work at Monroe Community College in Rochester, the performer exhibited amazing skills of kinetic character adaptation,  and insight into how we go into stages of denial when faced with racial strife. Anna Devere Smith walks the plank and talks the talk.

Portraying a variety of people, from all walks of life, she plumbs the depths of psychic distancing; the vocal intonations, the hesitations and lacerated silences, and the body language of those involved in cultural clashes and calamities. Working with a minimum of props, and a flair for timing that would be the envy of a Socratic dialectician out on the town, she treats everyone with equal aplomb and equality of means. Her performances are not just about mimicry. Nor are they character assassination rip offs, or finding the other in your self. Smith steps out of a “safe house” into someone else’s shoes, with a keen sense of empathy, to find out how they feel. And she does it fearlessly, with a broad grasp of cultural language and behavior second to none.  

Brought up in a segregated community in Georgia, an eye opening comment from her grandfather awakened her imagination. It started her on a journey from the known to the unknown and set off her career. He told her that the way to understand where a person is coming from is to repeat their words over and over again, until it grew into your bones. Eventually you will take on a sense of who they are, even if it takes all night.

The performer has developed a rare gift of logging on to people. She shares her discoveries with audiences, and does it with a delicate balance between tragedy and humor. She can also tell the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism comes out of a position of comfort. Hope is when you look around for a chair to sit on, when there is none.  

Racking up hundreds of tape recorded conversations, the monologist has put together three major solo dramatic works: “Fires in the Mirror” (an exploration into the 1991 Crown Heights clash between Blacks and Jews); “Twilight” (the L.A. riots and the police brutality case over the Rodney King beating); and “House Arrest” (about the relationship between the press and the Presidency, including interviews with Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., and Bill  Clinton). Smith has delivered up to 50 characterizations in one evening without resorting, for the most part, to characterture. She slips into the speech and body language of people like an angler juggling bait:

Listen to a black lady fed up with her fellow jurists. Refusing to sit down and make a decision in the second trial of the police officers who beat up Rodney King, the   jurors use every excuse in the book to distance themselves from the responsibility of determining guilt. When she demands that they do just that, they finally rise to the occasion with a unanimous vote of guilty, surprising her. Why they had a change of heart, well your guess is as good as mine. At the bottom line, Smith leaves us lingering with questions about the adaptability of human nature.  Or listen to the Korean lady who worked so hard to build her business and lost it in the violence of the Los Angeles riots. With measured tones of haunting resentment, the immigrant lady also expresses a grudging sympathy for the cause of the rioters; but no sympathy for what they did to her; a complex and identifiable reaction. Smith also tunes in to our ability to adjust with an uncanny portrayal of a Lubervitcher Jewish woman in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The woman, an orthodox Jew, is not allowed to turn on a light switch during the sabbath. So what does she do? She goes out into the street to find a non-Jewish person to turn on the light switch for her. That person happens to be a black teenager. Having no idea about religious Jewish customs, he’s surprised at what she doesn’t know, and teaches her how to turn a light switch on and off. The light switch metaphor is apt; double duty humor at its best.  

Anna Devere Smith has little interest in pretending to be something she is not.  She is not a politician using acting to win you over. Instead she has a cultivated affinity for how people use language in different cultural communities. And she does her job with a remarkable array of accents. Language is used as a tool to understand friction between peoples and foster trust where there was none before.

“When the audience talks,” Smith has said, “they are talking as much to each other as they are to me”. After the performance people stood up and exchanged racial experiences with embarrassment, courage, sanity, and passion. Which all goes to prove that in Rochester, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and perhaps even in conversations over Afghanistan, we are all prisoners of hope. At least I hope so.

©2001 Ned Bobkoff

Ned Bobkoff is a playwright, director and teacher.
He has worked with performers in a variety of community
and cultural settings throughout the United States and overseas 

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Winter 2001