Playwright Anna Deavere Smith turns to her family’s history for inspiration
6/25/202646 min
For more than 50 years, Anna Deavere Smith has pioneered a type of theater built from real people's words, interviewing hundreds of Americans and then performing their words verbatim. Now she's telling a story from her own family with ‘Basil Biggs.’ It’s about her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man, who reburied the Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground for Lincoln's most famous speech. Smith spoke with Tonya Mosley about how ‘Finding Your Roots’ led her to this story and why she sees herself as an Americanist.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[instrumental music] 48 teams We want to be one of the soccer powerhouses that people talk about 16 cities The joy of the World Cup is that it holds up a mirror to the society that surrounds it One beautiful game I think everyone knows that nothing is like a, a World Cup game The World Cup is here, and we have you covered. Follow along on and off the pitch with the NPR app.
Tonya Mosley· Host0:21
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today, actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, has played a national security advisor on The West Wing, a matriarch on Black-ish, and a magazine editor on Inventing Anna. But for more than 50 years, the work she keeps returning to is America itself. Smith pioneered what we now call documentary or verbatim theater. She interviews people, sometimes hundreds of them, caught inside a national fracture, like a riot or epidemic, and then she stands alone on a stage and performs their exact words. In her 1992 play Fires in the Mirror, she became Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the aftermath of a deadly racial conflict. In Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, she became the city in the days after the Rodney King verdict. And in her 2016 play Notes from the Field, she examined the school-to-prison pipeline. Here she is as Leticia De Santiago, a parent from Stockton, California, on the lengths she takes to keep her kids out of trouble.
Anna Deavere Smith· Guest1:28
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