Talk Your Medicine: Anna Deavere Smith Delves into Health Care by / Sam Hurwitt

Anna Deavere Smith is a playwright, performer and professor, but she’s also a pioneer. She carved out her own form of documentary theatre in which she embodies the many people she interviews, capturing their unique verbal tics and gestures as they talk about events and issues of great resonance, from the Rodney King riots to the state of civic discourse in America.
Now 60, Smith grew up in segregated Baltimore and made her way westward, getting her MFA from American Conservatory Theater. She became a tenured professor at Stanford, where she worked throughout the 1990s, and she now teaches at New York University.
Her latest play, Let Me Down Easy at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has been a decade in the making. In this piece her subjects are talking about health care and end-of-life care, which of course have become a hot-button topic in this country since the play premiered at Long Wharf in 2008.
This isn’t the first time that current events coincided to make her plays more resonant and timely than she could have imagined. Just before the opening of her breakout documentary play Fires in the Mirror in 1992, about a 1991 race riot in Crown Heights, the Rodney King riots broke out. This event became the subject of her next play, Twilight: Los Angeles. (Both Fires and Twilight played Berkeley Rep in the mid-’90s.) The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke just as Smith was finishing her 1997 play House Arrest, about Washington culture surrounding the president and the press.

What made you want to talk about health care?

I was invited to come to Yale Medical School in the late ’90s, to interview doctors and patients. It was well before what we call the health care debate began. So I did it as a gig, and then five years later I thought, huh, maybe there’s a play in this. In my projects, there’s a huge research phase, and in the course of my research I interviewed around 320 people on three continents. Then I had several workshops and three productions before it went to New York, and just as I was about to come to New York is when the president was about to roll out his health care bill. So I decided that I would refine what I had done so that I could focus on health care in America and the play could tell the human side of the story that is being told in fragments and fractions in American politics.

With a topic as intensely personal as this, what struck you the most when you talked to people about it?

You know, I’m basically a student of expression. What I’ve been trying to do for many years, what I’ve been trying to do since I was at ACT way back in the ’70s as a student, is look at language and how it works and reveals something to you about the world that you live. Obviously at ACT in the Bill Ball era, Shakespeare was very central to our training, so one of the marvelous things about having the opportunity to view the imagination of William Shakespeare is the extent to which the language represented not just the character but the times he lived in and was representing. This was all part of the project that I was interested in investigating. And I’ve been trying to get people to talk to me in an expressive way, that if someone were to pick up one of my tapes out of a trashcan 50 years from now, they would learn something not just about that person but about the world that person lived in. All the people in Let Me Down Easy are highly expressive about what happened to them, but also about this moment in America’s history. And it has to do with the human body, and that we all share. Whereas my riot plays were about specific events, this play is really about something that is happening to you. You have a body which is on a scale of power and vulnerability, and at any moment you could become more powerful physically or less powerful physically, and that’s true of the people around you and the people you love. And so I think the play speaks in that personal way, because that’s what’s personal about us. That’s what separates you from me—not just our experiences but the fact that you’re an actual different physical entity than I am.

What do you particularly listen for when you’re interviewing people?

I’m listening for the music that everyone at a certain point in the conversation begins to sing. I try not to ask too many questions. I pick topics where people are more likely to talk. In 1979 or ’80, when I was struggling to figure out what I was going to do with my interest in drama, I talked to a linguist I happened to meet at a party, and she told me there were three questions I could ask if I wanted to get people to speak in the way that I’m talking about: “Do you know the circumstances of your birth? Have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do? Have you ever come close to death?” The riot plays that I’m best known for were answering the question, without me asking it. “I was just walking down the street, and somebody pulled out a gun!” Or on the other side, “Why weren’t those police...why didn’t they go to jail?” The issue of justice, of something fair or unfair, is what that question, “Have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do?,” attends to. When I did the project at Yale, I only had to ask one question: “What happened to you?” And people just spoke on end in very, very original ways. That’s what I’m looking for. What we often do in speech is make things right. And when somebody is telling you about something very deep, they are in a highly creative state of trying to make things go right. But in the course of doing that, the language itself has moments of being upside down. They make mistakes, they may say the wrong word, they become truly creative in the way that they design the picture of meaning, both verbally and in physical gestures.

What inspired you to start doing this type of theatre?

Some lights really went on back at ACT in my investigation of Shakespeare—and just in the first place having gone to acting school not really with a plan to become a professional actor. I was sticking around to figure out how the change that an actor makes could be applied to social change. I don’t know that I’ve discovered that, but my work has been of use to people who are interested in various aspects of our society and how we live, and that pleases me. I’m very happy that many people from the White House came to see Let Me Down Easy. In Washington the First Lady invited me to perform one of the characters at an event that she just did. The secretary of health and human services and the director of the National Institutes of Health asked me to come perform for their staff. So I want the work to be of use. To be of use obviously it has to have partners, people who are really doing the work in civic space or political space, to think I have something to offer with what I’m doing.
And I’m very excited to come to the Bay Area, of course, because that’s where I changed my life as a young woman.

What impact did the Bay Area have on you?

Well, the first thing is that I’ve learned that beauty is calming and centering. And I think the beauty of the Bay Area really fed me with possibility. It opened up my whole view of what was possible. I had come there for the social revolution, which was over by the time I got there. Nonetheless, the sense of that tradition, as something that had just happened, was very exciting to me. Also I was really excited by the racial diversity that I saw in San Francisco and the Bay Area—not in the theatre audiences, by the way. But I’d never seen so many different colors of people. And having come from a segregated background in Baltimore, that was really exciting.
And the late Bill Ball gave me two remarkable possibilities. One, he put me in the company when I was still a student. And then when I was about to leave and go to New York, he encouraged me to stay and said, “We want to have an MFA program and we don’t have any students. Why don’t you be one?” It came out of a journey which started with $80 and an overnight bag, coming across the country not knowing what I was doing, and ended up with me being in a profession with a union card and an MFA. So I have a lot to thank the Bay Area for.
And I got tenure at Stanford some years later. Stanford University was a part of the fact that I’m doing the work that I’m doing right now. As a junior professor they let me out for a year to go do a fellowship at Harvard, and it was the first year of my life that I didn’t have to go to work every day. And that changed my life—I wrote Fires in the Mirror. So there are many, many debts that I have, many people I have to be thankful for, who really helped me at times in my life when I was vulnerable.