Anna Deavere Smith plays real Americans on stage – and she shares her lessons
It’s Been a Minute
LUSE: Anna is a pioneer of what’s called verbatim theatre, where the characters’ lines come straight from interviews, transcripts or recordings. But what does that look like? Basically, Anna interviews real people, selects their most powerful moments, then studies their words, speech patterns, and body language so that she can sort of become them.
DEAVERE SMITH: My grandfather had said when I was a girl, if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. I decided to really study how the people around me spoke. I literally would walk up to people in the street of New York – this is in 1980 – and say, I know an actor who looks like you. If you give me an hour of your time, I’ll invite you to see yourself performed. The whole idea was to use this technique in a way to chase that which is not me.
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DEAVERE SMITH: I became interested in how the rhythm of speech could inform an idea of who someone was. First of all, I don’t become anybody. People say that. I think of it as trying to make a jump. I call it the broad jump towards the other. You don’t make it, but you’re in this other place – colleague of mine, Richard Schechner at NYU, would talk about an idea of the not-not. So I can’t be you. So I’m not you. And I’m not me, but I’m in this other place. I’m in this effort.
And psychologically, what that is about, I think, is how I’ve decided to deal with my own sense of nonbelongingness, having grown up in a segregated city. If you really look at the whole thing I’ve been doing, it’s to get close to my opposites and to get close to strangers as a way of dealing with the sense of estrangement. And technically, what I do is listen to speech the way that you might listen to music. So I don’t just learn words, I learn utterances, and I – so I become acquainted with the – what I say is the song someone’s singing. And a lot of my work has to do with disaster and catastrophe…