Correct portrayals of real people key for solo projects
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Anna Deavere Smith has lived many lives as an actress for hire, moving fluidly among stage, film and television.
Her latest, “Notes From the Field,” makes the transition from stage to HBO on Saturday.
To examine many thorny issues — race, police shootings, the high-school-to-prison pipeline — Smith conducted 250 interviews, zeroing in on 18 real people, all of whom she plays. Included are U.S. Rep. John Lewis and activist Bree Newsome, plus teachers, inmates and students.
The work, of course, has a heaviness as it explores systemic racism, but it has lighter moments, too. It also highlights the need to keep pushing for dialogue no matter how difficult the conversations.
As a playwright and solo performer of her own works, Smith has given life to dozens of other people; her award-winning one-woman stage productions include “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” and “Let Me Down Easy” (2008).
The Baltimore native also has inhabited memorable characters in “The American President” and “Rachel Getting Married” and on “Nurse Jackie,” “The West Wing” and “black-ish.”
(On March 13, she will join the premiere of “For the People,” produced by Shonda Rhimes, on ABC.)
Smith recently discussed her work.
Do you feel an extra sense of responsibility in your one-woman projects because you’re portraying real people?
I don’t use that word. I think about the opportunity I have to get the song right and to get the dance right. Because to me,
anybody who ends up in one of my plays has a kind of communicative genius — somebody like Kevin Moore, the second character, who spent most of his young life in jail.
He read the dictionary backward and forward in jail. He’s perfect. When I woke up this morning, I was thinking about (a trait of) Kevin’s that I still don’t have right.
I’ve got to go back and listen to it again because why does it sound like me? That’s what it is. I don’t feel as much a responsibility as I feel an opportunity to take these extraordinary, expressive moments and get it right.
Your plays are not sequels per se, but they sometimes touch on overlapping topics. Do you think of them as being connected?
I think it comes down to justice and death. “Let Me Down Easy” was supposedly about health care, (but) it was really about death and loss. So I think I’m very interested in loss, and if there’s anything we can possibly do to correct it or stop it.
Do you feel like the work changes substantially when you move it from stage to screen?
The only thing I lose is — and it’s always hard — is capturing the audience. As my friend George Wolfe, the great theater director, once said to me, “Baby, people come to your theater to cry and mine to laugh.” (Laughs.) I feel I’m successful if audience members tell me that they had something like a cathartic experience emotionally. And that’s why I’m in the theater. But the benefit of film is, it’s going to reach more people.