Playwright, professor, and Performance artist Anna Deveare Smith grounds her avant-garde theater in the infinitely strange world of reality. "I look for the poem that the person is," Smith says of the real-people inspirations for her dramatic characters. Instead of creating...
[more]Playwright, professor, and Performance artist Anna Deveare Smith grounds her avant-garde theater in the infinitely strange world of reality. "I look for the poem that the person is," Smith says of the real-people inspirations for her dramatic characters. Instead of creating intricate backgrounds for her dramatic personae, Smith takes her tape recorder to the streets and interviews likely prospects for her plays. Debutantes, gang members, garbage collectors, housewives, and crack addicts all form the nucleus of her work. She performs her taped conversations with them verbatim, with vocal inflections, stuttering, and colloquialisms intact. This unlikely collage of voices alternately intersects, divides, and connects every segment of American society. Smith's imaginative mix of journalism, theater, and social commentary won her a $280,000 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1996 for the invention of this new theatrical genre.
Much of Smith's work derives from specific eruptions of social violence. Her 1994 play, 'Twilight: Los Angeles 1992," had its genesis in the race riots incited by the beating of motorist Rodney King. 'Fires in the Mirror,' which won the 1993 Drama Desk Award for outstanding one-person show, explored the exploding tensions between urban blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Smith's drama, 'House Arrest: First Edition,' is the last installment of her three-part work investigating the gap between "those who are heard and those who speak in America." This final piece probes the relationship between those who wield power and those who monitor them, as played out between the press and the power brokers jockeying for position in the 1996 presidential campaign. As director of Harvard's new Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Smith informs her leadership role with her artistic commitment to the hard-spoken truths of the underclass. However many creative hats Smith tries on, her theatrical talent and ingenuity begs to resurface. Her unnerving ability to become any one of her staggeringly unique characters, without a trace of caricature, has become legendary.
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