Exploring grace with Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith, the actress/writer who performs verbatim re-enactments of interviews with ordinary people and public figures, is in Cambridge reworking a new piece, called "Let Me Down Easy,'' that explores the theme of grace and features interviews with multiple religious figures, including an imam, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and two Christian ministers.

The piece is scheduled to open at the American Repertory Theatre on Sept. 12, but today I got a chance to see a sort of preview, as Smith spoke and performed at the JFK Library at the annual forum honoring Elizabeth Neuffer, a Globe reporter who was killed while on assignment in Iraq in 2003. Smith and Neuffer had forged a friendship after meeting at an awards ceremony, and Smith spoke movingly about Neuffer's life and career before sharing with the audience snippets of her play, still in development, which explores issues of human rights, a subject that also dominated Neuffer's work.

I think I've seen most of Smith's previous staged works, including "Fires in the Mirror,'' about the Crown Heights riots, and "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,'' about the LA riots, and even the first edition of "House Arrest,'' about the presidency and the press. She clearly has an ear for language, a knack for impersonation, and an eye for those revealing moments when people, in one short burst of speech, expose something raw and profound about themselves or their world. But this one promises to be painful, or at least poignant, on a different level -- the bits she performed today all involved people talking about death, dying, or human suffering, including a Rwandan woman whose family was brutally killed in that country's genocidal war, a South African woman who worked at an orphanage with dying HIV-positive children, and a doctor who worked at a hospital in New Orleans at the time of Katrina.

After the performance, I called Gideon Lester, the acting artistic director at the ART, to find out more about the religious ideas in the piece, and he said Smith has interviewed five religious figures, and is testing out those interviews in rehearsals as she develops the theme of a search for grace and kindness. ("Let Me Down Easy" was produced last winter at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and is being reworked for the ART.) Most prominent locally is the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the minister of Memorial Church at Harvard, whose mannered language and diction would seem irresistible given Smith's fondness for unusual voices to impersonate. Smith is also working on possible interview-based impersonations of James H. Cone, an expert on black liberation theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York; Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative in New York; Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk who lives in Nepal and has written a book on happiness; and Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.

(Photo shows Anna Deavere Smith in an earlier version of "Let Me Down Easy" at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, via the American Repertory Theatre.)