Media Archive

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.”

“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.