Anna Deavere Smith is taking her trailblazing blend of journalistic interviewing, engaged listening and artistic interpretation to explore the body as the vehicle for life and the human will as its fuelin her new one-woman show, "Let Me Down Easy." Smith's riveting characters are based on scores of interviews.
"The constant question I'm pursuing is: Is there anything in our human experience beyond the human body?" she says. "We chronicle life from when the body emerges to when the body is gone. But the spirit must be a part of who we are and what we are. Love is obviously a part of who we are. But our feeling and will are what keep us going. They're the fuel that keeps us in motion."
Smith conceived the project while interviewing patients at Yale University School of Medicine as a visiting professor. "When I talked to people about their bodies, they'd go on and on," she recalls. "Usually, we're so full of our thoughts and aspiration and our fears--we're always trying to move forward--that we don't think about our bodies. But if you have a toothache, and I don't cut you off, you'll talk at length about it. I thought it'd be very interesting to talk to people who are extremely aware of what's going on in their body because they are suffering or because they are using it to make a living."
Smith listened to patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and wounded U.S. soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. "I talked to a swimmer about what it meant to lose a race by two-one-hundredths of a second," she says. "I talked to boxers about what it means to be a champion. I talked to a mother leaving a hospital with her cancer-free child after two years. The body is a vehicle. What happens when the vehicle stops working?"
Smith is known for theatrical works on life in the United States, especially on controversial racial issues. In her award-winning "Fires in the Mirror," she used the words of black and Jewish residents to portray the racial tension of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1991. Likewise, her 1992 play, "Twilight," catalogued sentiments in Los Angeles, after police were acquitted in the beating of motorist Rodney King.
In "Let Me Down Easy," however, Smith goes beyond the nation's borders to examine the human will. She included the stories of South African children impacted by AIDS. She also visited Rwanda, the site of brutal tribal genocide in 1994.
"I talked to both tribes--the Tutsis, who were the victims, and the Hutus, who were the perpetrators of the genocide," she says. "Hutu prisoners who've been in jail for the last 10 years for their role in the genocide are about to be released. There's a national campaign for forgiveness. I listened to Tutsis, some of whom had lost family members, some who had been tortured themselves, talk to me about how important it is to for give the Hutus because if they didn't, there was no way for the country to move forward." Smith says the Rwandan experience illustrates how forgiveness is part of the human will to survive.
"Forgiveness comes under the category of being human," she says. "It's a nonphysical way we negotiate our way through life. It's part of our resiliency. Can you image what we'd be like if we didn't forgive? We forgive because we know there's something else about life--grace. Forgiveness is about grace."
--Yvette Moore
"The constant question I'm pursuing is: Is there anything in our human experience beyond the human body?" she says. "We chronicle life from when the body emerges to when the body is gone. But the spirit must be a part of who we are and what we are. Love is obviously a part of who we are. But our feeling and will are what keep us going. They're the fuel that keeps us in motion."
Smith conceived the project while interviewing patients at Yale University School of Medicine as a visiting professor. "When I talked to people about their bodies, they'd go on and on," she recalls. "Usually, we're so full of our thoughts and aspiration and our fears--we're always trying to move forward--that we don't think about our bodies. But if you have a toothache, and I don't cut you off, you'll talk at length about it. I thought it'd be very interesting to talk to people who are extremely aware of what's going on in their body because they are suffering or because they are using it to make a living."
Smith listened to patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and wounded U.S. soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. "I talked to a swimmer about what it meant to lose a race by two-one-hundredths of a second," she says. "I talked to boxers about what it means to be a champion. I talked to a mother leaving a hospital with her cancer-free child after two years. The body is a vehicle. What happens when the vehicle stops working?"
Smith is known for theatrical works on life in the United States, especially on controversial racial issues. In her award-winning "Fires in the Mirror," she used the words of black and Jewish residents to portray the racial tension of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1991. Likewise, her 1992 play, "Twilight," catalogued sentiments in Los Angeles, after police were acquitted in the beating of motorist Rodney King.
In "Let Me Down Easy," however, Smith goes beyond the nation's borders to examine the human will. She included the stories of South African children impacted by AIDS. She also visited Rwanda, the site of brutal tribal genocide in 1994.
"I talked to both tribes--the Tutsis, who were the victims, and the Hutus, who were the perpetrators of the genocide," she says. "Hutu prisoners who've been in jail for the last 10 years for their role in the genocide are about to be released. There's a national campaign for forgiveness. I listened to Tutsis, some of whom had lost family members, some who had been tortured themselves, talk to me about how important it is to for give the Hutus because if they didn't, there was no way for the country to move forward." Smith says the Rwandan experience illustrates how forgiveness is part of the human will to survive.
"Forgiveness comes under the category of being human," she says. "It's a nonphysical way we negotiate our way through life. It's part of our resiliency. Can you image what we'd be like if we didn't forgive? We forgive because we know there's something else about life--grace. Forgiveness is about grace."
--Yvette Moore
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