Smith, Anna Deavere

▪ 2009

born Sept. 18, 1950, Baltimore, Md.

 Anna Deavere Smith, who rose to prominence in the early 1990s while performing highly acclaimed one-woman shows dealing with race and class in the late 20th-century United States, returned in 2008 to the form that made her famous. In Let Me Down Easy, Smith broadened her perspective to explore the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body; she portrayed more than 20 characters who spoke out about current events such as genocide in Rwanda, steroid use among athletes, AIDS in Africa, and the U.S. health care system; the play opened in January in New Haven, Conn. Although she could be categorized as a playwright, an actress, an author, a journalist, or an educator, Smith appeared to have the main ambition of serving as a kind of mirror, reflecting American society back on itself.

      Smith was raised in a racially segregated middle-class section of Baltimore. She was a shy child who nonetheless developed a talent for mimicry. She studied linguistics at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) near Philadelphia, earning a B.A. (1971) before moving to San Francisco to study acting at the American Conservatory Theatre, where she earned an M.F.A. degree (1977). The following year she took a position teaching drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While there, Smith explored methods for actors to create characters by studying real people engaged in actual conversations. Inspired by her research, she launched her own ongoing project, On the Road: A Search for American Character.

      In addition to landing a role on the television soap opera All My Children, Smith wrote and performed several well-received plays as part of the On the Road project, but her breakthrough work was Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), which told the story of the racial tension that rocked the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn following an incident in 1991 in which the car of a Hasidic Jew went out of control and hit and killed a black child. Smith crafted the play from her own in-depth interviews, and she performed all 29 roles, moving seamlessly from one character to the next. The show received high critical praise and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 her next offering, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, was a well-executed and well-received exploration of the violence that erupted after the acquittal of four white police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, a black man.

      As an actress Smith appeared on television shows such as The West Wing and Presidio Med and had roles in the films The American President, The Human Stain, and Dave. She also authored two books: Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics (2000) and Letters to a Young Artist (2006). She was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (a “genius grant”) in 1996. After 10 years as a professor of the arts, Smith left her tenured position at Stanford in 2000 and later joined the faculty at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Anthony G. Craine

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