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When you listen to Anna Deavere Smith, you don’t just hear Anna Deavere Smith. The renowned playwright and actor builds her scripts from transcribed interviews with dozens of real people.

The school-to-prison pipeline. A country’s complex relationship with law enforcement. An educational system that too often deserves an “F.” These may be the lead topics from this morning’s talk shows and the headlines from today’s newspapers, but they’re also the recurring themes in Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.

What if the talkback were truly part of the show itself, and not an epilogue? That’s the model Anna Deavere Smith works with in “Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education,” a show that the actress/theater-maker seems to view more as an exercise in citizenship than simple, sit-and-applaud entertainment.

Actress, playwright, and teacher Anna Deavere Smith—as well known for her work on camera (Nurse Jackie, The West Wing) as she is for her searing, docu-style plays (Let Me Down Easy, Twilight: Los Angeles)—is bringing her latest experiment to the American Repertory Theater.

Anna Deavere Smith talks about her latest one woman show.

While no one on the campaign trail has yet to take on education and our incarceration crisis in a substantive way, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has. 

Writer, performer and professor Anna Deavere Smith says the U.S. is on the verge of a new civil rights movement. And, she says, the theater might help get people involved.

Notes From the Field is a heartbreaking examination of race and the criminal justice system from the award-winning actress and playwright​.

The Takeaway speaks with Anna Deavere Smith about race and America. Smith says coming together is what’s most necessary in these moments of pain.

Anna Deavere Smith Contains Multitudes – By turning herself into a diverse array of Americans, the playwright also transforms her audience.

“And each time I think back on some of Smith’s resonant monologues, the memory is not of her but of the real-life person.”

“In a way, what she does is more like a summoning or a séance than a play. I’d even call it anti-theatrical, except that it’s unquestionably great theater.”