10/12/06 News Release

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STANFORD, Calif. — Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith’s latest work, “Let Me Down Easy,” pays homage to the human body, both its frailty and its remarkable ability to heal itself. The new, one-woman show, which she will perform Oct. 25-26 at Stanford University, is another chapter in her long-running series for which she has traveled the United States in search of stories that deepen our understanding of the nation’s thorniest political, social and moral quandaries.

Her work has focused on charged political issues raised by events — such as the riots in Los Angeles and in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn — that offer a “doorway into the soul of a culture,” she said. While the subject matter of the new piece, with stories from Africa as well as the United States, would seem to depart from her past works, politics again plays a major role. “In looking at the body, we learn who counts and who doesn’t count, and how that gets managed is political,” Smith said in a recent interview.

Smith is well-known for her role as national security advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s “The West Wing.” She has also received wide acclaim for her trademark, one-woman shows that weaved together a number of character monologues, based on interviews she had conducted with people from all walks of life. She has won numerous awards for her play, “Twilight: Los Angeles,” which examined the civil unrest following the Rodney King verdict, as well as for “Fires in the Mirror,” which explored racial tensions between blacks and Jews that led to the 1991 race riots in Crown Heights.

In preparation for her latest, 90-minute piece, Smith traveled extensively and interviewed hundreds of individuals, each time listening intently to their stories and absorbing their characters so that she could inhabit their personae and bring them to life on stage.

She visited New Orleans after the Katrina disaster, where disparities in care were grossly magnified, she noted. She also spent considerable time in Africa, for finding America in this interconnected world meant looking beyond its borders, she said.

She interviewed AIDS patients and caregivers in South Africa, as well as Tutsi survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and their Hutu perpetrators about to be released from jail. She lived in the forest with traditional Ugandan healers and traveled north in the country to meet young girls and boys who had been abducted into sex slavery or forced into military service.

She also talked to people whose bodies are extraordinary and uncompromised, such as athletes and models, and whose livelihoods depend on their exceptional physicality. Over time, she said she hopes to develop the thread of what enables the body to function in the extreme.

“Whether the body is in good form or decaying, there’s a good question about what else do we have other than our body—whether it’s people who have spiritual ideas at the end of life or if it’s swimmers who are trying to touch that wall. What gives you that last extra stretch that is not physical but is more something else inside? Is it will or what is it? I’m interested in what else is there.”

She said the piece remains a “work in progress,” though when she comes to Stanford, she’s likely to portray a model, an athlete, a sex worker, a South African orphanage director and a Ugandan who works with traditional healers. She will also bring to life former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who died of esophageal cancer in September. Smith interviewed Richards while her disease was in remission and portrayed the feisty, plain-spoken politician at her memorial service.

Smith said her latest show had its genesis in 2000, when she served as a visiting professor at Yale University School of Medicine. There she produced a piece called “Rounding it Out,” a series of interviews with doctors and patients on the vagaries of the health-care system.

“People spoke with a lot of passion, honesty and openness,” she said. “My work is based on getting people to talk to me, and this was a place where people wanted to talk and were not hiding behind words.”

She continued to examine health-care issues while visiting Stanford’s School of Medicine in 2004, where she interviewed faculty, alumni and students about diversity in medicine. She presented the resulting collage of personalities and views at the annual dean’s retreat in January 2005.

At the conclusion of her performance at Stanford, she will engage in a question-and-answer session with audience members. She said she doesn’t expect to come with a message; she just wants to start a conversation. “I always expect that audiences are bringing something,” she said. “Everybody’s had an experience with the human body, so everybody has something to say.”

Just as theater is participatory, so is health care, she said. “I think it’s dangerous for us in our health-care system to become passive consumers. I feel very aggressive about that in the theater. Audiences shouldn’t be passive consumers.

“That’s an advantage of the theater. As much as I love TV and movies, they’re not as interactive,” she added. “My sense is that here we are all together around the common reality that we have a body that is here for a limited period of time. What do we do to cherish that and the fact that it will go away? I’m just trying to use the occasion to reflect on the inevitability and the mystery.”

Her Oct. 25 performance is sponsored by the School of Medicine’s Office of Diversity and Leadership, along with the Stanford’s Drama Department, Lively Arts and Continuing Studies. The following day, Smith will also lead a workshop for students in the Drama Department, where she served as the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of the Arts from 1990 to 2000. She is currently based in New York, where she is a professor at New York University.

 

Anna Deavere Smith will perform "Let Me Down Easy" Oct. 25-26 at 7 p.m. at the Roble Studio Theater on the Stanford University campus. The Oct. 25 show is sold out, but a limited number of tickets is still available through Stanford Lively Arts, (650) 725-ARTS.

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