This staging of Anna Deavere Smith’s latest work was an excellent example of the innovative, ethnographic style of drama she has pioneered, that is, a one-woman show in which the shapeshifting Smith channels the words, voices and visions of people she herself has interviewed. The subject of those interviews, as Smith tells us at the start of the show is the suffering and resiliance of the human body. But then again, really, she’s interested in the spiritual side of resiliance that buoys up the body, something her interview subjects/characters refer to as “grace.”
The show was in many ways a superb example of the power of theater: the Loeb Drama Center is terrifically intimate, the themes were complex and heavy (genocide from the view of Rwandan perpetrators and survivors, crimes of the US health care bureaucracy, the safety taken for granted by the rich, the risks and abuses lived daily by the poor). The performance itself was intensive, prolonged, moving and uneven.
Did students like it?
One measure, tragically, might be the bluey glow and flicker of text-messaging erupting in a few too many parts of the theater. So said the head usher as he pulled me aside during intermission.
“Excuse me, are you in charge of the group from Lasell?” Uh-oh.
But there are other measures. As Prof. Gerardo said to me the next day, those students who enjoyed the performance really enjoyed it and defended it passionately in class. Beautiful.
And if some first-year Lasell students went to this performance and decided theater was not for them, then at least they are basing that judgment on a fine example--the work of a top-notch artist offering a powerfully evocative work that demanded much from the audience.
More than one student told me, “I didn’t get it,” meaning that the humor in the show was out of reach. As one woman put it:
People in their forties behind us would crack up, and we didn’t understand what they were laughing at. As 18-year-olds, we know the health care system in the US has severe problems, but we don’t understand those problems well enough to get her jokes.
Fair criticism. Engagement with several of the “characters” depended on background knowledge. A winning portrait of the late Texas Governor Ann Richards is a terrific example. Responding to the warmth, humor and “grace” of her monologue is completely dependent on the knowledge that she was a well-loved, wise-cracking, Democratic governor ousted by George W., and now dead of cancer. Whether they know it or not at this point, this kind of insider knowledge is exactly the kind of historical and cultural capital that 18-year-olds are paying, paying a great deal, to get out of their college education.
What did I think?
This student’s criticism is different than mine but not unrelated to it. I don’t object to the set of “insider” cultural references. Instead I was disturbed by the powerful elitism and odd privilege I found deeply present in the structure of the play--that is, the selective arrangement of monologues: who was interviewed and portrayed on stage, what type of weight and significance was given to which speakers, who experienced pain, who got to think about it and analyze it for the audience.
On the one hand, Smith brought before us a host of university deans, theologians, professors, and writers based at Harvard, Yale, Stanford as well as representatives of opera, the arts and journalism. On the other hand, we also met jailed perpetrators, survivors of violence, patients making painful decisions about dialysis or fighting for basic care. One set proved the keepers of knowledge; the other the bearers of experience. While the latter testified to suffering, the former made sense of it.
The play didn’t seem to critique this divide as much as rely on it. While interesting in their own right, figures from elite institutions, largely reflecting on the bodies of others, received recurring roles in this show and anchored it structurally. This aspect of the performance became harder and harder to take while seated comfortably in a theater in the middle of Harvard Square.
College is undeniably the gatekeeper of “insider knowledge” and a gateway to privilege for many in this culture (but no guarantee of that privilege). But more radically, college education can be, should be, a challenge to that privilege. It can shift fundamentally the framework through which one lives, analyzes, and acts in the world. It should pass on the tools of social action and the example of social movements. It can spur unsettling personal transformations and spark revolutionary change.
For this reason, in the days since the play, I’ve thought a lot about the traditions in theater that have aimed at nothing less than revolution. Plays have moved audiences well beyond pity and terror on to outrage and laughter and action: strikes, demonstrations, boycotts.
These traditions include Augusto Baol’s “theater of the oppressed,” Mbongeni Ngema and other playwrights of South Africa’s black resistance theater under apartheid, the work of American Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino organizing farm workers with César Chávez, or the award-winning efforts of Magdalena Gomez’s newly launched Teatro Vida, training the youth of Springfield, Massachusetts to be actors, writers and community activists in their own right.
Students are fortunate to have access to the theater of Anna Deavere Smith, and they deserve exposure to much more.
