Media Archive

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.

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.