Critics credit the actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith with inventing a new form of socially conscious theater. She becomes, through uncanny mimicry, people she has interviewed. Over the past 40 years, the 66-year-old professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts has won a MacArthur grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and other honors for her one-woman productions made up of interviews on a single event or theme — riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles, the health-care system, Washington’s political culture. Arizona State, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale are among the universities that have commissioned her projects on race, gender, diversity, and listening. You might also know her from roles in films including The American President or TV series like The West Wing.
Delivering the 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture, Ms. Smith cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s “inescapable network of mutuality”: “Recognizing our interconnectedness in today’s society may seem difficult,” she said, “but we could muster the courage to work for it.”
Her new work, Notes From the Field, now playing at Second Stage Theatre in New York, concerns the school-to-prison pipeline, in which disadvantaged children disproportionately become incarcerated adults. Smith selected 18 monologues from some 250 interviews, and during roughly two hours on stage, she becomes a student, an inmate, a congressman, a nonprofit director, protesters, a pastor, a principal, and more. A central theme of the show is that America needs to make a much greater investment in its children. The evening ends on a bittersweet, hopeful note, with her rendering of Rep. John Lewis recounting moments of forgiveness and grace.
