ARTicles vol. 7 i.1: A Search for Grace

Anna Deavere Smith is one of the country’s greatest writers and performers, with a unique theatrical style. Each of her productions is an investigation into questions of political and personal identity – the L.A. race riots in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the violent encounters between African-Americans and Lubavitch Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in Fires in the Mirror. For each production she conducts hundreds of interviews, and then performs as the interviewees on stage, taking meticulous care to reproduce their vocal intonation and physicality. The result is a diverse and non-partisan approach to impossibly complex situations – a truly democratic interweaving of politics and theatre.

In her latest one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy, Anna takes a journey in search of human qualities that are too seldom in the news – compassion, generosity, and grace.

Channeling a dramatic range of interview subjects, from artists and philosophers to healthcare professionals and survivors of the Rwandan genocide, Anna Deavere Smith asks a question for our age: how do we pursue grace and kindness in a competitive and sometimes distressing world?

Gideon Lester: You’ve been developing Let Me Down Easy for more than a decade. Where did the journey begin?

Anna Deavere Smith: In 1998 I got a letter from Dr. Ralph Horwitz, who was then Chair of Internal Medicine at Yale University Medical School, now Chair of Medicine at Stanford. He asked me to come to Yale and interview doctors and patients, and to perform the interviews at the Medical School’s lecture series, known as “grand rounds.” I dodged him for almost two years, and then finally I went to Yale in 2000. Every weekend while I was at Harvard as director of the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue I’d drive to New Haven and spend Saturday in Ralph’s office, listening to stories from patients and doctors. That fall I performed at grand rounds. The speaker there is usually a scientist, and it took place in a medical amphitheatre with a blackboard behind me and a lab table in front of me, and all these doctors in there at 8:00 am in their starched shirts and ties, annoyed that they were told to turn their beepers off. Much to my shock it was very well received. People were very moved, and it really found a way into my heart too. The patients I’d interviewed had come to see it, and it was powerful that they were there. They had an invaluable look on their faces that had nothing to do with how well I’d done; it was because they were hearing their stories in another medium. Nothing gives me a greater sense of fulfillment than that.

GL: Why did you dodge the invitation for two years?

ADS: I thought at first it was because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of smart people. Many of us are disappointed with the healthcare system and with the experiences we sometimes have with doctors; however, they are incredibly educated people with a very unusual attention to detail, which is intoxicating for a person like me whose whole work is about listening. But now I understand that I was afraid of exposing myself to so many stories about illness. People’s words are saturated with their experience, and if they’re sick their language is saturated with their illness. After a weekend of interviews I’d feel physically ill.

GL: While you’re performing, do you continue to feel a strong sense of empathy with the people you portray?

ADS: I have to be simultaneously distant and present. Much of what I’m doing on stage is technical; I’m like a singer trying to hit the right note. But the process of compiling one of these plays is long and complicated, and I can have an emotional response at many stages – during an interview, or when I’m transcribing the text, or listening to the words over and over, or learning the lines, dwelling in the lines, seeing what they mean.

GL: How did the project continue to develop after Yale?

ADS: At that time I thought the play would be primarily about mortality and the human body. In 2002 I met Samantha Power (the foreign policy expert), who was writing about Rwanda. She told me that if I was working on the body then I had to go there and talk to survivors of the genocide. So I went in 2005, and Samantha helped me to get set up. Rwanda was already in my heart because of an extraordinary Rwandan playwright, Hope Azeda, who had been at the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue. While still in Africa, my staff and I were shocked by images of Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. looked like Africa in crisis. I went to do interviews in New Orleans when I returned. The journey continued with an intensive series of interviews at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I then had an invaluable experience at the Zachary Scott Theatre in Austin, where I presented the newly acquired material in a series of staged readings, hot off the press. By last summer, when I worked on Let Me Down Easy at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, I had an encyclopedia of interviews – doctors, patients, physicists, musicians, athletes, journalists, and on and on. I explored the material for two weeks with the Long Wharf’s Artistic Director, Gordon Edelstein, and it was there I learned that the piece would be about life as much as death, about a search for grace. As Angie Farmer, the mother of a cancer patient in Houston, said to me, “Living – that’s what you learn from this experience. You don’t learn how to die, you learn how to live.” With that in mind I’m now conducting more interviews, and we’ll continue to develop the play in rehearsals at the A.R.T.

GL: Does religion play an important part in your life?

ADS: I had an extremely religious upbringing, and a very conservative Methodist background. Couldn’t dance on Sunday, couldn’t go to the movies on Sunday, that kind of thing. I am an Episcopalian, and at the moment I’m working through what my religiosity and spirituality are.

GL: Does “grace” have a religious meaning for you?

ADS: Reverend Peter Gomes, the Minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church, describes grace as the moment when you are about to do something one way, and you realize God would want you to do it another way, and you actually go God’s way and make another choice. In his mind, grace is doing what God would have you do. He also points out that we don’t always go God’s way. To my mind, Gomes’s idea of grace requires discipline, or a change in your inherent nature and a subsequent taking of the higher ground. When I interviewed him we talked about the song “Amazing Grace,” which was written about a slaveholder who freed his slaves. The slave owner had a conversion. A notion of grace actually first came to me from listening over and over to theAdagio from Schubert’s “Quintet in C,” the Christmas after my mother died. I’m haunted by the word “grace,” because of something that happened to me during my confirmation at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The bishop had forgotten his glasses. He was an old man, I’d have thought he’d have known the word by heart, but he started stumbling. He repeated, “God grant her … God grant her …” and he leaned over to the priest and asked, “What is this word?” And the priest said, “Grace.” That never left me, and the word became charged in my mythology. But I think of grace less as a religious concept than as a force in nature. Grace lies in a dancer trying to make a difficult movement look effortless and beautiful. My dog has an incredible amount of grace. Grace is in how we treat each other when we could choose to exert power and we find another way. Grace is related to kindness. It can be political, or social, or aesthetic. Let Me Down Easy is a great treasure hunt; I’m searching for examples of grace that I can share with the audience.

GL: The play is also very much about healing. One of the doctors you interviewed talks about the growth of the relationship between physician and patient as a journey that two people are taking, not just one person.

ADS: Yes, I love that. That’s Asghar Rastegar, at Yale. He goes on to say that some of the most maturing events in his life have been going through a critical illness with a patient and seeing that person get over self-pity, accept, and move on. He talks about how it causes him to realize that he could be that other person on the other side of the table. This also has a relationship with the theatre, because when a performance is working, someone in the audience has that kind of relationship with the least expected character, the least expected idea.

GL: What do you hope the audience’s experience will be?

ADS: I can’t presume to say. I hope a connection happens, and I don’t really think about the “takeaway,” as they say in corporate America. I think less about what people take away than what they bring. Every member of the audience brings something into the theatre: a relationship to their body, to illness, mortality, vulnerability, resistance. It’s exciting that they bring so much into that room, where we are trying to uncover the mysteries of the human condition. I remember my friend Evelynn Hammonds, now Dean of Harvard College, talking to me about science when she was a professor at MIT. She described science as “Mother Nature revealing her mysteries to you” – you have to be present and patient for them when they come forward. It’s wonderful when that happens in the theatre, and the presence of the audience is critical. Together we can discover some new mystery about how we are as humans, in that hour and a half we spend together, trying to peel away the layers of the onion. That’s what I hope happens for them, and for me.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Acting Artistic Director for the 08/09 Season.

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