For Anna Deavere Smith, the way is rarely 'Easy'
In her one-woman show at ART, she explores what gets people through their pain
CAMBRIDGE - Inside the theater, the stage door is locked up tight. A sign is posted: Anna Deavere Smith, Rehearsals. Two assistants sit outside. Clearly, work is being done. Inside the dark space is a couch, a couple of cushioned chairs, and a rack of clothes, from suit jackets to simple threads. And each day a new script is born.
Smith, who has made a career of blurring the lines between journalism and art, is trying on characters, some old and some new: A Hasidic lady screaming in her New York kitchen. The owners of Eight Belles, the recently euthanized horse from the Kentucky Derby. A young girl from Uganda who was forced to become a sex slave.
Some characters work. And some do not.
It has taken Deavere Smith eight years and dozens of interviews to get here, to this stage, where she is reworking her one-woman show, "Let Me Down Easy." It opens at the American Repertory Theatre on Sept. 12.
She has traveled to Rwanda, gleaning painful details from those devastated by genocide; Uganda, where terribly young boys were forcibly recruited to the army and forced to kill; and Cape Town, where AIDS still ravages.
Over 20 years her work has led her to explore race riots in Brooklyn and Los Angeles and to New Orleans after Katrina. Lately she's been talking to everyday folk, extraordinary athletes, models, mothers, doctors, and cancer patients about to die.
In "Let Me Down Easy," Smith wanted to explore human mortality and the choices we are forced to make as our bodies succumb to time and circumstances. But the more people she interviewed, the more lives she saw come undone, she decided that she wanted to focus on what gets us through our pain: grace and kindness.
In a New Haven run this year, critics called the play thought-provoking and funny, but too broad in scope. Smith calls it a work in progress. In Cambridge, she says, she is putting on a show no one has ever seen before.
"All of my plays have had different versions," she says, sitting on the couch. She is freshly made up and somewhat out of breath from hours of rehearsing. "I am not sure why that it is," she adds after a moment. "I suppose it's because it is real life. Things change. I am constantly updating. And that is really why I came here."
Smith's portfolio of one-woman shows, notably "Fires in the Mirror" (about the Crown Heights riots) and "Twilight: Los Angeles" (about the Rodney King aftermath) earned her scores of awards, including a MacArthur "genius grant." Newsweek once hailed her as "the most exciting individual in American theater." The New York Times deemed her "the ultimate impressionist. She does people's souls."
The acclaim also brought her to television and movies, with roles in "The West Wing," "The Practice," "The American President," and "The Human Stain." For a few years, she was in residence at Harvard leading the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue, which encouraged conversation about the arts and current events.
In "Let Me Down Easy," Smith will inhabit characters as they cope with anger, hurt, reason, and violence. Her grandfather once told her, "Say a word often enough, it becomes you."
"I'm putting myself in another person's words the way you put yourself in someone else shoes," she explains. "Inevitably when you talk about your body there is a time clock about it. You know you will not be here forever. I am looking at this amazing amount of material I have. All the facts on how the body is vulnerable to time, possible disease, and affairs of state. Where is grace going to come out of that?"
She gets people to talk to her, she says, simply by showing up and lending an ear.
"The thing about going to tough places at a rough time in a person's life . . . is that people, even given that fact, still had a strong will. They wanted to talk. They wanted to be heard," she says.
And in a flash Smith hunches over and curls up her lip. She becomes a Hasidic woman in her kitchen pounding her fist.
"I just wish I could go on television," she seethes as her voice grows louder and louder. "I just wish I could go on television and yell to the whole world: It was an ACCIDENT!"
Suddenly Smith is herself again. "Now that," she says, "was a woman with a strong will to communicate."
When Smith's show was focused on mortality, she embodied steroid-using athletes, cancer-stricken patients, and an African folk healer. She switched from a Southern drawl to a thick Rwandan accent, from portraying a supermodel giving away her secrets to a Hurricane Katrina victim fighting to overcome tragedy.
But now she is trying to portray people who show grace under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Where does it exist? Is grace effortless beauty, as in the New York City Ballet? Or is it the man in Penn Station, with one arm shorter than the other, who insisted recently that he help carry Smith's oversized luggage even though it was a struggle?
"That man with that heavy bag, volunteering to help and struggling with that bag, I felt that was grace in motion," she says emphatically.
Every day she comes to rehearsals and puts on new characters with speed and precision. She and her dramaturg, Gideon Lester, who put together the 2008-09 ART season, go over what works and what doesn't. In the show at the ART, Lester said, Smith will include characters that she met here in Boston, just as she included portrayals of doctors when she performed it at Yale University Medical School.
"It's not that there was anything wrong with earlier incarnations of the show. It will always be developed wherever she performs it," Lester points out. "We have conversations about the show, and we have a new draft the next day. I think this is the most personal play she's ever written."
"Let Me Down Easy" began to coalesce when Smith was invited to interview doctors and patients at Yale. That led to a one-woman performance before scientists and medical officials.
It was eye-opening.
"I just got very interested in the stories of people who have health issues . . . the human body. My tape recorder gives me the necessary distance to get close to people," she says, borrowing a line from photographer Mary Ellen Mark. "It allows me to sit with a stranger and to find out how they are and to hear how they dealt with the happy times and how they dealt with very difficult situations."
It was foreign policy expert Samantha Power and the late Boston Globe foreign correspondent Elizabeth Neuffer who ignited her appetite to travel to Rwanda and Uganda. Smith met Neuffer, who was killed in a 2003 car accident in Iraq, when she presented the reporter with a journalism award.
"She knew so many people. She was interested in everybody. I mean, this woman [could] eat and sleep anywhere! I can't do that."
Inspired by her friends, Smith made the journey.
"I really understand, after eight years in this project, I really understand that there is evil in the world," she says. She recalls the girl in Rwanda who lost her parents when she was 6 - a girl who, lost in the woods, saw a man stoned to death.
"I completely understand that we all have an expiration date - the rumor is true," she adds. "In the face of this understanding is the question: What do we do about those realities? I think we can strive, study, and re-engage, and find within our own resources moments to share grace and kindness wherever we can, whenever we can. I know that's what I intend to do."
Megan Tench can be reached at mtench@globe.com 