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“A wonderfully energizing new performance,” raves Ben Brantley.

‘I’ve been interested in people who see the dignity in struggle’

Anna Deavere Smith is a riveting veteran stage educator. Her latest and equally timely original theater text “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education”— seamlessly directed by Leonard Foglia at American Repertory Theatre—not only ranges as before back and forth between participants and observers in a documentary-like piece but also includes an intriguing interactive 25-minute middle section calling on audience members to listen to and teach each other through questions, answers and comments.

In “Notes from the Field,” Smith has created a stunningly nuanced, inventive, and emotionally resonant investigation of how the country values the lives of young people of color.

Smith transitions gracefully and convincingly between characters, with enough humor mixed in to keep the material from pushing the audience to despondency.

This is an important piece of political theatre, well played and directed that has a great deal to say about the problems caused by unequal education. It is thought provoking, engrossing, and entertaining.

Once again she unpacks some of the most unpleasant realities of American life, ones we would rather not face—racism, inequality, educational failure, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, the tragic waste of human lives. In this extraordinary telling, these issues are exposed as a complex nest of interrelated problems.

About midway through the first act of “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education” – Anna Deavere Smith’s emotionally stunning, outrage-inspiring but ultimately hopeful one-woman theatrical performance on the devastating societal effects of the school-to-prison pipeline – I found myself wondering how an audience that was not primarily composed of “serious” theatergoers (in Cambridge, no less) would have received the impactful material.

From the classrooms to the streets, from the glorious memories of Selma to shocking cellphone video that captures a school officer tossing a student around a classroom, here’s the raw stuff of actual and urgent crisis.

Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education is so much more than a “One Woman Show.” 

The overall effect of this play is stunning and deeply moving – moving one to tears at an emotional level and moving each individual to want to find a way to make a difference.

Marshalling her considerable creative forces and once again singlehandedly conjuring a wildly diverse array of characters, Anna Deavere Smith schools us from the front lines of education vs.race in these not yet United States.