Anna Deavere Smith
Beyond the Kitchen Table: A Riff by Anna Deavere Smith
By Nan Goldberg
You are an explorer.
You understand that every time you practice,
or every time you go into the
studio,
you are after something that does not yet exist.
– from Letters to a Young Artist, by Anna Deavere Smith
In 1993, I was in the audience at the Joseph Papp Public Theater to see a one-woman play called Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities, conceived, researched, written, and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. By the end of that spellbinding performance, I had a new creative idol.
Fires in the Mirror was part of a larger project that Smith calls In Search of American Character, which includes two other plays conceived and performed the same way. Taking as her creative seed a particularly American phenomenon or event, Smith “illuminates” it from multiple perspectives by combining the interview techniques of journalism with the interpretive art of performing. (Fires in the Mirror was inspired by the 1991 clash between Jews and African-Americans in Crown Heights, while Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 came out of the riots in L.A. after the Rodney King verdict. The presidential campaign process, and the American presidency itself, were the inspiration for her play House Arrest.)
Smith is also a film and television actress, probably best known for her role on The West Wing; a drama teacher at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts; and she has just published her second book.
Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts – For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind (Anchor Books, 240 pp., $13 paperback original), is the compressed wisdom of 30 years of experience as a performing artist, written as a series of letters to a fictional high-school student, a visual artist whom Smith calls BZ. In her preface, Smith explains, “I was trained at a time when artists were thought to be ‘special’ people.” But “I don’t think we are so special. I think the world around us is incredibly special, incredibly magnificent, in its lightest and darkest and most ordinary muted parts. I am looking to speak, in this book, to you brave folk, younger than I, who are trying to express something that you feel will make a difference in the way this earth stays in orbit … to make art that is meaningful, and that seeks to study and inform the human condition.”
Recently, Smith and I spoke on the phone for the second time (I had also interviewed her upon the publication of her first book, Talk to Me), and found her to be as energetic, passionate, and thoughtful as before:
N.G.: Fellini once said, “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” What do you think about that?
A.D.S.: Very interesting. What Fellini is probably suggesting is that we only know something inasmuch as we know it through our experience, and what an artist is doing is rendering that experience and that knowledge in a metaphorical rather than a factual way. So he’s talking about the limits of human experience: that you can only create out of what you are.
Now, I made a decision early in my work that I really am not interested in writing about the kitchen table around which I grew up; I’m interested in finding out about others.
But I suppose that a very perceptive person could nonetheless look at my plays, which are me quoting other people, and say: “I see the signs of your kitchen table in your work.” This reminds me of a physicist I once met who was convinced that if a very smart psychiatrist, if he was also a physicist, would be able to look at his work and learn a lot about his own personality. We don’t think of scientists’ work as necessarily autobiographical, but I suppose we all leave our tracks wherever we walk.
Tell me about your family. Do you come from a large immediate family, or a small family?
Big. There were five of us, and I was the oldest.
What about your extended family: Large or small?
Very big. My father was one of six and my mother was one of eight, so it was a big, big family on both sides, four grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins and all of those people.
Do you think that that cacophony of voices that you grew up hearing might have something to do with the way you can populate a stage with so many personas all by yourself?
Sure. There are lots of stories, I suppose, of sitting around dinner tables with people talking a lot and talking loudly. There was a lot of discourse and a lot of dialogue, though I don’t remember myself speaking so much, especially when my aunts and uncles were over. There’s this wonderful quote by Eudora Welty, where she talked about sitting beside the staircase when all the grownups were talking in another room, and she would sit there and her ears would “open up like morning glories.” So to hear all of that noise was a joyous thing to me.
I have a feeling that my mother must have read to me very, very expressively when I was a little girl, because she tells me how I would ask her to say certain parts of the story again, or ask her to sing “Jesus loves me” again, so I think that’s just my nature: I like the way things sound, and I had a profound, unquenchable desire to hear language. The people in my family, particularly on my father’s side, have very resonant voices, really resonant voices, and to this day I love a nice grounded resonant voice. One of the first people for whom I ever performed was my Aunt Esther, who was my mother’s oldest sister, and she spoke in a very, very expressive way, so there was a lot of vocal expression, a lot of vocal enthusiasm. And I loved hearing all of them, just loved it. I think there was a kind of vocal mastery that everybody had that I was longing for, the way another little girl might have liked to watch her aunts all dressed up in makeup and jewelry.
But really, I think my ability to reproduce that cacophony of voices has more to do with the city I grew up in, Baltimore, and when I grew up, which was when the city was moving from — if not a legally segregated state, then a culturally segregated state — into something else. I went to a high school that was predominantly white, and I was in the student government, so we were this black and white team. In my junior high, whites and blacks had not associated with one another at all, so it was important to me when I went to high school that I had lots of opportunities to reach across rifts and hear different kinds of voices.
In the book version of your plays, and also in this new book in your interview with the painter Brice Marden, you transcribe your interviews into stanzas or lines that look exactly like poetry. Do you think that speech is a kind of poetry? What is the difference between poetry and everyday speech?
When I do that, what I’m trying to share with my readers is that the first formal thing I’m hearing, more even than the words they’re saying, is how a person speaks: when do they stop, when do they start, phrase by phrase. People speak in different rhythms, and that is what I am trying to capture with that type of form.
What I say about these things I collect is that they’re “organic poems.” But actually I think there’s a big difference between poetry and everyday speech. I think that poets, unlike any one of us who’s speaking in normal tongues, have some profound question they’re trying to illuminate in extraordinary, individualistic language, less polluted by all of the things that affect the ways that we speak. Many of us speak without completely realizing how our speech has been affected by the popular culture or the people around us. I see this in my students all the time, and I’m always urging them to come to that place in themselves that is particular.
Still, when you edit these transcripts, you somehow render this speech into poetry. Would you agree with that?
I think what people are actually doing when they speak, to combine what you’re saying about poetry with what you’re saying about Fellini, is that they’re doing a sort of biographical jazz riff – or at least that’s true of the ones who end up on stage. Part of how I choose somebody has to do with whether or not they are doing that riff, and as they do the riff, that at a moment in the riff they deliver that pearl of wisdom, which is something very, very particular that only they could possibly have done. And in fact I know I’m succeeding when an interviewee says something or does something, maybe an action or a tic, that not only would I not have expected it but it’s so far from who I am that I don’t even understand it.
“Confidence
I think part of it
Is the doubt
And the doubt –
It affects the color …”
Brice Marden, from an interview in Letters to a Young Poet
So then I’m gonna take that thing and I’m gonna work with it. It’s gonna gestate, we’re gonna work together, me and whatever that gesture is or that tic, and my goal is to illuminate it. My acting is me getting on the path of their minds and therefore absorbing something about their biography which is inside of the words – not the words themselves but in the rhythm of the words. And there Fellini is absolutely right: The illumination over time will tell you as much about me as about the interviewee, because it’s about my world view in his tic, and it’s about his tic informing my world view. His tic will knock on the door of my self-conscious and release things I didn’t even know were there. So my quest is to take that tic and make it into a fiction, but through that fiction, to try to examine and propose another kind of truth.
When you interviewed Brice Marden you asked him what, exactly, he’s looking at when he looks at a painting. And he said he’s looking for the questions that the artist is dealing with, and the way he answers those questions. What questions do you think you are dealing with in your work?
I was dealing with one question for a very long time and that question was: What is the relationship of speech to identity? And I guess today you and I have been talking about that a little bit.
And the new question that I’m trying to deal with is: What is the gap between understanding and action?
Can you elaborate?
Well, you know, we all wake up in the morning and we say: “Gee, I should go to the gym today,” and sometimes some of us go and some of us don’t. So what is that gap? When we understand something, when we know it, that doesn’t mean that we necessarily do it. And I’m very interested in that. I don’t know what work it will show up in, but I would say that’s how I would like to spend the next several years, in trying to understand that.
What are you working on right now?
It’s a new play called Let Me Down Easy that addresses global health care. We’re still organizing that, putting it together.
And also I’m working on a screenplay of Edward Jones’s novel The Known World. Hopefully they’ll both be ready within the calendar year.
Do these relate to what you said you were working on now, the gap between deciding and doing?
Yes, it’s about understanding your actions. When I say it’s what I’m working on now: I mean it’s the lens through which I plan to spend the next many, many years. Because I would like BZ to be a do-er.
And the other thing I asked BZ, a really important question, which I think is one of the reasons to write the book in the first place: “Are you becoming an artist because you want the whole world to look at you — or would you like your ability to attract attention and see things differently to cause the world to see itself differently, through you?”
You talk about narcissism and self-esteem to BZ, and yet you don’t quite un-knot the conundrum that on the one hand, you would seem to need self-esteem in order to succeed as an artist, and on the other hand, so many successful artists seem to have very low self-esteem, and are really needy of others’ support or even adulation. How do you resolve that?
I don’t think you do. I think human beings are complicated. And an artist is usually putting something of him- or herself on the market. And what I think is very difficult for any one of us as an artist, except people who are extremely famous and therefore can call the shots, is that we’re always in this dilemma of daily having to work with the price tag that is put on us, but not to internalize that price tag as our self-worth.
In other words, we can’t let the buyer be the only determinant of that price, because the danger is that you will make yourself immobile, either if you believe the low price or if you believe the high price. You have to know the price. And that is very, very hard. And I think that’s the most important thing to try to get to BZ, is that BZ has to know her own worth.
All these years with my students, I’ve told them: “I know you would like me to tell you if I think you can make it. I’m never going to tell you that. That’s not fair to you. And I’m never going to evaluate you on the basis of your talent. I’m going to evaluate you on some very simple things: Did you show up? Were you on time?” That’s how they’re graded. Because I believe that they have to know the real grade about what they’ve done.
RECOMMENDED READING:
FICTION
“SECOND HONEYMOON,” by Joanna Trollope (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $23.95): “Be careful what you wish for” might sum up this drama about a woman whose grown children start returning home just as the last one is about to leave.
“THE MINOTAUR,” by Barbara Vine (Shaye Areheart Books, 352 pp., $25): Vine is the pseudonym of Ruth Rendall, the brilliant mystery writer. And this creepy, almost gothic, story of one British family’s secrets, including sexual obsession, betrayal, and finally murder, is at least equally mysterious and brilliant.
“ELEMENTS OF STYLE,” by Wendy Wasserstein (Knopf, 308 pp., $23.95): The only novel by this popular playwright, who died a few weeks ago of cancer at age 55, it is a spoof of the rich urban gentry, post-9/11, from the perspective of a Manhattan pediatrician.
“THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER,” by Hilma Wolitzer (Ballantine, 272 pp., $24.95): Alice Brill, a 51-year-old wife, mother, editor, and frustrated writer, is forced to take a good look at her life.
NON-FICTION
“IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW: A Chronicle of Identity and Adoption,” by Michael Mewshaw (Unbridled Books, 240 pp., $23.95): Mewshaw receives a call from a young woman who thinks he may be her biological father. He isn’t, but in helping her find her father, he resolves a few mysteries of his own.
“KISS TOMORROW HELLO: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty,” edited by Kim Barnes and Claire Davis (Doubleday, 304 pp., $24.95): Funny and candid portraits of contemporary midlife issues, such as keeping love and sex alive, caring for elderly parents, even considering plastic surgery.
“SOLIDARITY FOR SALE: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise,” by Robert Fitch (Public Affairs, 432 pp., $28.50): Fitch, a union member since the age of 15, paints a devastating portrait of the movement’s failures while insisting that there’s still time for reform.
“CURIOUS ATTRACTIONS: Essays on Fiction Writing,” by Debra Spark (University of Michigan Press, 176 pp., $19.95 paperback original): For both aspiring and experienced writers, and also for passionate readers, Spark’s essays address questions like where the idea for a story comes from; first words and last words; magical realism; and writing the short novel.
Photo by Jennifer Weisbord