printable version5 questions: Deavere Smith on her new play about the frailty, resilience of the human body
Anna Deavere Smith
Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith's new work, "Let Me Down Easy," pays homage to the human body, both its frailty and its remarkable ability to heal. The one-woman show, which she will perform in workshop Oct. 25-26 at Stanford, is the latest in her long-running series of plays, for which she has traveled the United States, searching for stories that deepen our understanding of our thorniest political problems. The medical school's Office of Diversity and Leadership is a sponsor of the event. Medical Center Report asked Smith about the show in advance of her performances.
1. How did you get to thinking about doing a piece on the human body?
Smith: When I was doing research in Washington, D.C., for "House Arrest" [her play on relations between the press and presidency], I would turn on the tape recorder, and people would stop talking. People were closed and tight. So when I was invited to Yale to talk to patients and others in health care for a work on the physician-patient relationship, it was amazing to me. I would ask one question and have people speak to me so openly. They would sing songs, show me their scars and introduce me to their families.
My work is based on getting people to talk to me, and this was a subject about which people wanted to talk and were not hiding behind words. Everybody's had an experience with the human body, so everybody has something to say.
2. What did you notice in your interviews about the differences in how patients and doctors discussed medicine and health care?
Smith: Patients speak abundantly about what is happening to them. Perhaps because they are sometimes in a crisis and that crisis yields a powerful, complicated narrative. Doctors, in my experience, are in part scientists who have a lot of information about some of the kinds of things that bodies experience. However, so far, their discourse, as I have witnessed it, is first and foremost less emotional. I'm sure that comes as no surprise.
3. There must have been something in your conversations with doctors that was at least striking, if not surprising.
Smith: When I did interviews in 2004 with doctors and scientists at Stanford [for a piece about diversity in medicine], it was exhilarating to sit with them and see how each one meticulously tackled the same problem. At one point I had the opportunity to be in the operating room with Linda Shortliffe [professor of urology] and to watch that meticulous, careful, tireless work.
Watching her operate had a huge effect on me aesthetically. It's changed how I write.
I'm more interested in being meticulous, sticking with a point and knowing that I can go back over something many, many times and make adjustments—they may not be large adjustments, but they're the right adjustments. She takes things that aren't working, changes them and makes them work by finding another way than the way that nature initially intended.
4. Is this play a continuation or maybe even a conclusion to your previous works—"House Arrest: A Search for American Character," "Fires in the Mirror" and "Twilight:Los Angeles, 1992."
Smith: Well, there's no conclusion. I mean, I think that's why I gave myself this very long range of projects. I mean, I knew I would never find "American character." And now with this project, as you know I'm going out for it in the world. My search, which started as a search for American character, has probably become more of a search to understand more about the human condition. But it's not like I really thought I would discover any one thing. It's not like finding a cure for cancer or something like that.
I don't think you've asked me this question, but I'm always asked what do I want the take-away to be. I find that a very unattractive and distasteful idea about human engagement of any kind—and certainly about art or about classrooms. And so I don't really think about results, I really don't. Part of it has to do with the way I was trained in the first place, which was very much about process. And part of it is just who I am. And so one of the things I always say to students, and I'm sure I'll say it at Stanford, is use your education to find your questions. Don't even think you're going to find answers.
5. There may not be answers, but there must be a wide range of perspectives, right?
Smith: In looking at the body, we learn who counts and who doesn't count, and how that gets managed is political.
And whether the body is in good form or decaying, there's a good question about what else do we have other than our body—whether it's people who have spiritual ideas at the end of life or swimmers who are trying to touch that wall. What gives you that last extra stretch that is not physical but is more something else inside? Is it will or what is it? I'm interested in what else is there.
My sense is that here we are, all together around the common reality that we have a body that is here for a limited period of time. What do we do to cherish that and the fact that it will go away? I'm just trying to use the occasion to reflect on the inevitability and the mystery.