Media Archive

This immersive physical and aural experience leads audience via headset, on solo journeys that intersect.

Perhaps there’s something fitting about an irreverent take on Sean O’Casey’s classic of the Irish theater, “The Plough and the Stars.”

O’Casey’s play focuses not so much of the patriotic, nationalistic spirit of the revolt against British Imperial rule as it does on the citizenry doing their best to survive in a bleak situation.

A long view of history informs the Abbey’s latest production of The Plough and the Stars, dutifully staged during the centenary of the Rising, which tries to fathom the place of 1916 in today’s nation by bringing Sean O’Casey’s characters blinking into the light of the present.

You wouldn’t want to pass up a chance to watch the Abbey Theatre perform “The Plough and the Stars,” the Sean O’Casey play that provoked riots when the Dublin troupe debuted it in 1926.

Directly addressing the audience and breaking into cabaret-style song, the high-energy ensemble cast deliver O’Casey’s dialogue with conversational ease, rather than the traditional embellishment.

“Notes from the Field” homes in on what some call the school-to-prison pipeline: the syndrome in which poor, usually minority youths are disproportionately punished, even in pre-school, then shunted into the juvenile justice system and often into a lifetime of ins and outs at the Big House.

A superbly conceived and delivered, and very moving, inquiry into racism, schools and incarceration.

That said, Smith’s performance is majestic. As in her other solo shows, she uses her body and voice as instruments of transformation, segueing from a preacher to a school official with the ease of a chameleon.

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.