It’s hard to say who Anna Deavere Smith is.
She’s an actress. She’s a writer. She has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, earned a Tony Award nomination, taught at Stanford University and received a prestigious fellowship for writers, artists and politicians in Bellagio, Italy.
She played the White House press secretary in the movie “The American President” and recently turned up on the small screen as the national security adviser on “The West Wing” and as a lawyer on “The Practice.”
“As Sam Donaldson said to me, `You’re an actress, but you’re really serious about social issues,”‘ Smith says with a wry smile, promoting her book “Talk to Me” (Random House, $24.95) during a recent Atlanta visit. “As if the two things are never supposed to meet. People think of actors as frivolous movie stars. But a lot of the movie stars I know are pretty serious people too.”
Oh, one other thing Smith has been: a near-statistic, on the night she was nearly shot by Washington police outside the home of her host, a New York congressman. “They were charging at me, screaming, `Get back! Get back! Get back!”‘ Smith recalls.
But let’s get to that in a second.
Now 50, the Baltimore-raised writer-actress-activist made her first big blip on the cultural radar in 1992, in her acclaimed off-Broadway one-woman show, “Fires in the Mirror.”
A unique blend of journalistic reporting and empathic performance, “Fires” resulted from hours of interviews in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. She was trying to get the truth about the riots that occurred after a Hasidic Jewish man accidentally struck and killed a black boy with his car, and a young Jewish scholar was stabbed to death in retribution hours later by a group of black men. Smith talked to dozens of people — Jewish homemakers, Nation of Islam leaders, Al Sharpton, street thugs. And, in the show, portrayed them, using their own words, verbatim, from the interviews. The result was a mixture of sociological study and dramatic coup, by now a trademark of Smith’s pioneering theatrical work.
She followed up with another piece based on a riot, this one on the West Coast following the violence sparked by the Rodney King verdict. For “Twilight: Los Angeles,” Smith ventured into the racially charged neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. But nothing scary happened to her there.
“Never were 12 guns pulled in my face,” she says, in contrast to the D.C. incident.
The irony in that case is that Smith was the one who called the police, fearing that an intruder had broken into the home of her host, Rep. Amory Houghton. But when police arrived and saw her walking out of the house, they jumped to conclusions.
“I saw myself suddenly as though I were dead on the ground, and I thought of all the black men this has happened to and began to imagine what would be written about me as justification,” she says. “People who would come forward to say, `Oh, how could that happen to Anna Deavere Smith?’ But others might come forward and say, `Oh, but you know she’s very aggressive.”‘ She stops to laugh.
“I think my life could be distorted: `Look at her work; she’s very angry. And after all, she plays 46 people.’ You know, pathologizing me.”
It’s this empathic awareness — that all stories can be told from multiple perspectives — that gives her work its charge.
She went to the nation’s capital to gather interviews about the presidency for her most recent stage show, “House Arrest.” What she found was a closed system that generates distrust among political insiders and the press that covers them.
This fall she became a presidential debate junkie, because she’s so attuned to what people Studs Terkel, journalists and others were saying. Their words stagger down the page, like poetry, capturing their idiosyncratic speech.
“I tend to be more interested in people who are very imaginative in their language, and who as they’re speaking with you, whether they know it or not, are actively involved in putting a kind of artistry into their language,” Smith explains. Because of that, she admits, none of the middle-class blacks she interviewed for “Fires in the Mirror” made it into the performance, because their language lacked an inner poetry.
Moises Kaufman’s recent off-Broadway play, “The Laramie Project,” based on interviews conducted by his acting company about the murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, owes a debt to Smith’s work. She says she’d someday like to train her own acting company in her interviewing and performance techniques. “But we’d look like Santeria or the black church,” she says, “because people would be being possessed by character. I mean, it’s a kind of spiritual experience when it’s clicking for me, you know? It’s really a high when you get to that place.”
Newly appointed at New York University’s school of the arts in performance studies, and affiliated with its law school, Smith has been busy promoting her book and trying to find an affordable apartment in the city. Meanwhile, she’s waiting to hear whether one of her roles on “The West Wing” or “The Practice” might become a regular gig.
“I wish,” she says. “You just have to wait. But you can’t really do that; you have to get on with your life. And if they call, you hope that you haven’t planned to be in Botswana or something.”
