Anna Deavere Smith brings the voice of the people to the stage
artists can command a stage solo with arresting care and engagement as Anna Deavere Smith.
Her trademark onewoman shows — such as “Twilight: Los Angeles” about the 1992 Los Angeles riots and “Notes From the Field,” about the school-to-prison pipeline — have been the hallmark of her body of work. She sparks questions about social injustices and looks for solutions in her career as a playwright, author, professor and actor.
Those not familiar with her stage performances may know her from TV, with roles on “The West Wing,” “Nurse Jackie” and as Tracee Ellis Ross’ TV mom in “Black-ish.”
When the Alley Theatre opened its 76th season this fall, Smith was presented with the lifetime achievement award. Past recipients have included Arthur Miller, John Houseman, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Colleen Dewhurst and Horton Foote.
“What an incredible body of work she has given us,” said Rob Melrose, artistic director at the Alley. “Anna has developed a method of storytelling that creates indelible insights and memories. I’ve seen firsthand how transformational her techniques can be for actors. I believe with all my heart that the way Anna approaches acting is exactly what the world needs right now.”
Smith has created a new art form that is part journalism, part literature, part politics and part acting.
For “Twilight,” she conducted more than 320 interviews and crafted a stage play from that. She did more than 250 interviews with students, parents, teachers and administrators caught in the school-to-prison pipeline for “Notes From the Field,” which was adapted into a television movie by HBO. In October, Prairie View A&M University hosted a screening of the film and discussion with Smith.
“I’m what you call a race woman,” said Smith, 72, who is also a professor at New York University. “That’s just a term that people used to use to talk about men and women who were committed to the betterment of condition for Black people.
That comes out of growing up in a segregated environment with a wish for social justice.”
Smith talked with the Chronicle about her work and her latest project on jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald.
Q: Your body of work is so multidimensional. Would you say you’re an anomaly?
A: I think my multifacIn
eted career will be more the reality of younger artists going forward. It’s very unlikely for people to have a career anymore that’s one thing. My sense of younger people, particularly my students, is that they think of themselves as entrepreneurial. They think of themselves as being able to do many different kinds of things. It’s rare that you get to stay on the same show for 25 years. I was on a hit show called “The West Wing,” and I think it only lasted seven or eight seasons, so that’s just eight years you have doing something else.
Q: Why is teaching so important to you?
A:
Teaching has alFew
ways been a part of my career since 1973, and I think that’s just genetic. My mother was a teacher. Most of my aunts were teachers. I grew up around teachers, and so that’s just something that has a genetic pull. It has taught me how to watch and listen, because when you teach performers or young artists, you have to figure out not just what to say but when to say it.
Q: How do you find the subject matter for your plays?
A:
Sometimes it comes to me. I would like to take complete credit, but before “Notes From the Field,” about the schoolto-prison pipeline, it was a play about medical care.
fact, I did a lot of interviews for that in Houston at MD Anderson Cancer Center. This was back in the mid-2000s, when the head of internal medicine at Yale University School of Medicine invited me to come to Yale as a visiting professor. That blew my mind. He was interested in me interviewing doctors and patients around the matter of listening. That got me really interested in what became a much bigger endeavor — looking at the body as vulnerable to doctors, to disease, to race, to war. A lot of times, these ideas come from other people who feel that the theater could be useful in how folks think about issues.
Q: You conduct hundreds of interviews for one play. How does that work?
A:
My projects always start with me not understanding something. I try to throw a very big net to try to understand, and it leads to varieties of ways of looking at things. Anything that’s going to help a large, diverse group of people in an audience connect to a social problem is what my job is.
Q: A lot of people found the pandemic as a time to write books or do other creative projects. What did you do?
A:
I wrote, and I started changing my career. I had decided after “Notes From the Field,” I want to take commissions. I want to write for other people. I don’t want everything to be generated by me. I want to write for other actors in new ways, I want to try new forms. For example, this play about Ella Fitzgerald is not my idea. Somebody else commissioned me to write that play. I’m also working on a play about Billy Jean King. Somebody commissioned me to do that. So it’s taking other people’s ideas and saying, “OK, I’ll see what I can do with this.”
Q: Tell me about your connection to Prairie View A&M University President Ruth Simmons.
A:
I met her when she was provost at Princeton, and she played an incredible role in convincing me that I did not have to leave academia. I was going to leave. She convinced me that I should stay in academia, because I couldn’t figure out how to put that together with my work as an artist, and she convinced me of that by fluffing up my ego, by saying, “It’s really hard to do what you’re doing. You’re Black, you’re a woman, you are an actress, and it will be very difficult for you to get tenure, but you need to do it to make a model so that other people can do it.” And so I stuck with it.
Q: Do you think the theater has gotten better in terms of covering people of color?
A:
When it comes to representation, the issue usually comes up after a tragedy, like George Floyd, so we have to try to advocate for better resources, more opportunity and new ways of thinking about ourselves.
Q: What’s next? A:
I’m doing a play about Ella Fitzgerald. I didn’t do interviews, other than to talk to a couple of people who had known her. But it’s a fictional play. The thing about Ms. Fitzgerald is there’s no major biography on Ella Fitzgerald. That’s right, and so it was really a scavenger hunt, in a way, of trying to piece together things to make a play that will be a portrait of her and that will, I hope, honor her remarkable talent.
Q: Any new TV or movie gigs?
A:
I don’t have one right now. I told my agent that I wasn’t going to be available because I knew that I would be tied up with these writing projects for right now, but hopefully, I’ll come out of it and people will not have forgotten who I am.