Anna Deavere Smith
Writer of Fires in the Mirror
Fires in the Mirror was Anna Deavere Smith’s first successful play but the 13th that she wrote. You may recognize her from her film and television roles in The West Wing, Nurse Jackie, The American President, Philadelphia, or Black-ish. But it is in the theatre she has truly made a mark. Her impact on the American theatre is tremendous.
Anna Deavere Smith
She created an entirely new genre of theatre (Verbatim Theatre). She has been at the forefront of conversations on race in the American theatre both through her own work and her moderation of the famous August Wilson/Robert Brustein Town Hall debates of the 1990s. And she has probably done more to explore and document the “American Narrative” than any other playwright.
The American President
Anna Deavere Smith was born in 1950 in Baltimore Maryland and was part of the first generation of integrated public schools there. She was one of only seven Black women in her entire college class, and even fewer in the acclaimed MFA acting program at American Conservatory Theatre (ACT). She frequently talks of growing up not feeling that she didn’t fully belong with her peers and as a result becoming a keen observer and imitator.
Her training at ACT was Stanislavsky based acting, which asks the actor to find the characters within themselves. Smith though was curious about playing characters who were specifically not like her.
She talks about acting as akin to playing jazz, in essence having a rhythmic collaborative conversation. Her grandfather once told her that “if you say a word often enough, it becomes you,” and she put these two ideas together to begin exploring creating character through repeating the rhythm and cadence (or “prosody”) of how people speak. Around that time she was also inspired by Walt Whitman’s assertion that, “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” Thus, she set out to “absorb her country,” through the prosody of one individual American at a time.
She began to interview, record, study, and then recreate hundreds upon hundreds of people. She compiled these interviews into 12 plays; plays that few people saw and fewer read. As she honed her technique, she discovered that people were at their most interesting, their most real, when they had a desperate need to communicate, but had not had time to plan the articulation of their ideas and feelings.
Black-ish
That kind of communication happens in moments of crisis. And so, in 1991, when riots broke out in Crown Heights, and she was in the area, she turned her lens towards this community in crisis. She interviewed over 100 people, ultimately curating those interviews in the play that you see today, which asks an actor to “absorb America” as a means to encapsulate an American narrative.
The West Wing
She did this again the next year in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which dealt with the 1992 LA riots after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King. Since then, she has gone on to explore numerous American narratives, each time interviewing, absorbing, and performing a diverse set of real people.
For her work, Smith has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Gish Prize, the National Humanities Medal, received over 20 honorary degrees, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Receiving the National Humanities Medal