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Anna Deavere Smith
Actress & Author, House Arrest and Piano: Two Plays
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
Anna Deavere Smith: This is very, very special to see so many different parts of my life come together in my favorite city, San Francisco. I came here to do something on social change and by fluke ended up across the street. There was this woman on the switchboard called Beulah. She was black and hardly anybody else here was, in the audience or on the stage, so I had a particular affinity to her. She was fabulous, but she wasn't warm. I said, I'm looking for a stage management job? She said, "Well, my dear, are you in the union? I guess you could come to our summer training program, we have classes." I took a class with no clue that there was such a thing as "Masters in Acting" or any of that stuff, and I wanted to do social change. There were these people changing in front of me, in my classes they were changing, so I thought, Maybe I should just hang around and watch how they change and then maybe we could talk and think about social change.
I was terrified of two things - yoga, from standing on my head; I still can't do that. And I was terrified of my Shakespeare class. On the first day we had to do this exercise where we had to get 14 lines of Shakespeare and say them over and over again "until something happened." I took these 14 lines home and I said them over and over again and it was amazing. I just opened up for 14 lines and it turned out to be Queen Margaret from "Richard III." It's the beginning of the play but he's killed a lot of people, and she's talking to one of the mothers of one of the people he killed, and she's saying things like:
That dog, that had his teeth before its eyes,
To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood…
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.
I sort of obediently said this over and over again and soon I saw Queen Margaret - this little bejeweled woman - and I had no other reason to see her other than my imagination. And I thought (there were not chemical substances), Wow, how did that happen? That became the beginning of my quest; I tell students: Your education should be about the questions that you can find there, not the answers, because they keep you going. I found my question here at ACT, and that question was: What is the relationship of language to identity?
I've been working on that for 30 years and trying to understand as much as I could about America by listening to people talk. Trying to find the link between what they said and didn't say, and by the way, it's rhythmic rather than content. It linked up with something my grandfather told me when I was little which was, If you say a word often enough it becomes you.
When I was in Washington, I went to study presidents and the history of presidents and to learn the relationship with the president to the press. I interviewed Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., Clinton and all these journalists. I packed my bags and was leaving when the Monica Lewinsky story broke - so I had to stay. At the same time that that broke, there was another story that broke: Somebody found DNA to prove that Thomas Jefferson had a black woman as - I don't think of her as a lover or girlfriend, because I can't imagine what that would have been like. But she had his children, and there was a big debate about that.
Barbara Lane: What's the secret of getting people to talk to you?
Smith: Listening. I try not to talk a whole lot. I try to be prepared as much as I can. Some people have written books and things and some people haven't at all. So it's just listening.
Lane: How do traumatized communities like Crown Heights and South-Central L.A. react to your work? Has it ever been incendiary?
Smith: It was incendiary once, but it was in the early days. I've done more than 16 of these now, but it wasn't until the 13th one that I got any notice. I made one at a college community once and I'll never make one like that again. It taught me a lot about people. They gave me people to interview and the questions to ask and I had no idea I was walking into an incredible minefield. I was sort of being used to say things they weren't saying to each other. I didn't know it until after the performance how explosive it was.
Lane: You've described Bill Clinton's conversational rhythm as jazz.
Smith: He has a remarkable ability to speak, and now that he's not president he's more musical than ever. One indication that a person is a healthy speaker is how much music there is. Children even have a certain amount of music in their speech. With him, I tried to be prepared - there were reams and reams of stuff. This was in '97. I had to have one question that wkeep him talking. They told me I had ten minutes. They put me in the Oval Office with him, and the question I asked was (and this was before Monica Lewinsky): "Mr. President, do you feel you're being treated like a common criminal?"
He went on and on and on. And they are knocking on the door: "Mr. President, time is up, you really have to get ready for tonight."
"Okay, bye."
"Mr. President, you have to rest your voice."
And he went on and on and on.
It's a complex piece, but at the beginning when I said, "Do you think you're being treated like a common criminal?" he said, I think George Washington said that he was being treated sort of like a common criminal. No, I wouldn't say that. At the end he talked about how, of course, the Republicans were beating him up and he said, I'm like one of those Baby Huey dolls; you punch 'em and they come back up.
Lane: You haven't interviewed George Bush Jr. But just from listening to him speak, how would you describe his conversational style? [Audience laughter]
Smith: I'll take responses from the audience to that question. No comment.
Lane: Did you come to any conclusions about the press after researching "House Arrest"?
Smith: Historian Roger Kennedy said about Jefferson: It was almost impossible to find him in verbal undress. That's how Washington was. People were so covered and so cool and it was amazing because right after I left Washington - I had been there five years - I had been asked to come to the Yale University School of Medicine as a visiting professor and interview doctors and patients. I would sit down with my tape recorder and interview a patient and ask one question, "What happened to you?" and they would be up showing me their scars, crying, praying, bringing in their grandchildren and their wives. Washington is a place, not just now but historically, where you really can't afford to be caught in verbal undress.We really don't have the skills to look underneath all of that iambic pentameter and find out what's happening, because people are so slick, everybody's dressed up; they have to be.
Lane: But every once in a while somebody gets caught.
Smith: But it's too bad that it's always negative, you know: It's Howard Dean and it gets repeated over and over again. It's too bad that the notion of being caught with an honest remark, you get punished for that. I think it's just awful, because a lot of times when people make slips, to me, it's not all bad, there's some beautiful things when people come out from behind that iambic pentameter. It's very hard for people to find a way to speak from the heart. It's not what Washington is about. We must support the theater and we must support the arts, because that is one place where we can speak from the heart, and I admire everything that Carey Perloff has done to keep the heart alive in San Francisco.
Lane: You've been watching the commission hearings and Condoleezza's testimony -
Smith: Condi was my provost at Stanford. When I first got a call from Aaron Sorkin to do "The West Wing," I wasn't even going to go; I was running an institute at Harvard and overworked, and my publicist said, "Get on that plane and go out there." This was in August 2000. I had already been in Aaron's The American President. I arrive and we're standing outside the set, and there was some word that Bush may be thinking of Condi as national security advisor. I said to Aaron, "In asking me to come out here to be national security advisor, are you thinking about Condoleezza Rice?" He said, "Who?" So I guess I'm the first black woman national security advisor.
Lane: Comment on your mother as an inspiration.
Smith: Unfortunately, I lost my mother this year in September. She was a teacher, she was kind, she believed, as Johnnie Cochran does: There are three sides to the story - yours, mine and the truth. Probably my idea of hearing multiple voices comes from her idea that there's always more than one side to a story.
Lane: How can young actors and artists create work and participate in the current cultural-political climate that is so unaccepting of criticism and dissention?
Smith: We have to be braver than ever and take our responsibilities seriously. Those of us who are artists are the few people in this country that still have the public trust; CEOs have lost it, educators have lost it, doctors have lost it. They trust us, not for necessarily good reason. We mustn't squander that and we must use our ability to attract attention to make it go beyond us. A platform for education of actors in the future should be less about, Is everybody looking at me? and more about, Am I using my ability to attract attention so people can see through me a world differently? But the celebrity culture doesn't need any more celebrity.
It's really the question of why haven't we made our war painting, and knowing that it could be out there and the media just doesn't show it to us. Any of you out here who are artists or people who support artists: Give each other courage and to make that metaphoric war painting, because we need it more now than we've had in a very long time.
Lane: Do you consider yourself a social activist?
Smith: One reason I came to A.C.T. was that from the minute Beulah looked me up and down in that way she did, I knew this was a magical place. I could have been out in the streets doing social activism, and I decided that, as Ionesco did - he decided to be a playwright rather than a statesman because as playwright he could have more than one idea, take more than one position. Sometimes, I think, with the social activists, I so admire what they do, but I'm not sure if I'm temperamentally able to stick with one idea. I'd rather mix it up and ask you to do the other part and make a decision for yourself. I don't want to tell you what to do. I think I can walk side by side with social activists but in another way do a kind of a heightened communication, which is its own discipline and takes a lot of time to do, and that's what I'm doing. I see myself as a cousin and a partner to activism but I see myself as a person who is a clown and a fool and I take my foolishness very seriously.
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