Anna Deavere Smith - Interview

THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW, AND THE INTERVIEW AS LIVING ART

In Talk to Me, Anna Deavere Smith gets on paper her unique, MacArthur-winning approach to documenting the way we speak and live in America. Her performance pieces-including Twilight (about the L.A. riots) and Fires in the Mirror (about the Crown Heights riots)-stem from hundreds of interviews which she compiles and replicates verbatim, playing all the characters herself. Most recently, developing House Arrest, she spent several years in Washington, D.C., questioning people about the relationship of the press and the presidency. Talk to Me is a memoir of how Smith developed her approach to playwriting, and how her experiences in Washington changed her understanding of our political landscape. It also features transcripts of casual speech by many a major player, including Bill Clinton and George Stephanopoulos. But here, unlike in her dramatic work, the verbatim transcripts are leavened by Deavere Smith's own observations on racism, the relation of politics to the actor's craft, and the power of language to rev eal the authentic self.

EMILY JENKINS: In the book you say your work was inspired by working as a secretary in the complaint department of an airline.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: That experience plus other things bubbled and boiled together as something that ended up being the theater that I do, theater which starts from an interview. Interview magazine even played a part.

EJ: Really? How?

ADS: I remember very well an interview the magazine ran [September, 1980], which was a verbatim transcript of a bunch of people, including Paloma Picasso, walking around the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I was very interested in the interview as a format for drama [at that time] and had even used some of the transcripts from [other copies of] Interview magazine in some of my classes. In acting I try to find a moment when a person says something so unique, so particular, that if I repeat their words over and over, I can become that person.

EJ: In Talk to Me, you write that politicians have borrowed the skills of the actor, but they misuse them.

ADS: [laughs] Well, everybody is using acting! ... Somebody somewhere along the line told [politicians] that if they seemed more authentic they would appeal more to voters. But acting is not an exercise to win anything. Most people would probably tell you that the worst kind of acting is the acting where the actor is most concerned about being liked by an audience. That's not the actor's job.... Acting is creating a fiction in order to tell a big truth. There's nothing about it which is hiding, lying, pulling the wool over people's eyes, convincing, winning, and selling. None of those things, but the skills of acting are being used in society to do [just] that. In the courtroom and in politics.

EJ: I know you've met Bill Clinton numerous times. Did you feel differently about him after he gave you a prolonged one-on-one interview?

ADS: I was surprised that the most observed person [in Washington] would also be the most expressive person. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect him to have as extraordinarily large a range of vocal expression as he does.

El: He's a wonderful speaker.

ADS: Well, yeah. Nobody can teach you that. That is something that you have or you don't have.... And I was surprised that he started the interview by saying, "How you doing, girl?" I wouldn't have thought to hear those words in the Oval Office.

EJ: The central question of your work on the presidency is, "To what extent does the president hold our culture together? And to what extent does he not?" Do you have an answer to that?

ADS: I don't think the people in Washington are doing a very big operation. They're not challenging themselves to learn enough in real ways about our culture. [Washington] is a very intensely defined, constructed, almost segregated world, which feels like twenty or thirty years ago. It felt more like the college I attended in the 1960s and early '70s--or even segregated high school. Make that junior high school.

EJ: Because of that sense that you're in a small world, and that the rest of the world doesn't affect you?

ADS: A very, very small world that is interested in what is immediately around it....I would say that [the government] is not holding us together because it doesn't have to. It's able to exist without being tested that way. When I wrote my play about the Los Angeles riots [Twilight) I was surprised to find out that not one person other than Bill Bradley in the Senate got up and said anything about them.

EJ: Wow.

ADS: Maxine Waters, an African-American congresswoman, was alarmed that when they had a meeting about the riots neither she, nor John Lewis, nor anyone from the congressional black caucus was invited...that a meeting like that would be held by the President of the United States without people representing their own constituencies there! [Washington is] still able to maintain itself almost in the model of an earlier America.

EJ: Frank Rich of The New York Times reportedly called you "that rare actor who actually should be encouraged to run for public office." Any thoughts?

ADS: I will quote lonesco. Someone asked him why he decided to be a playwright and he said that he chose to be a playwright rather than a statesman because as a statesman he could only have one point of view. And as a playwright he could experience, explore, and put forward more than one point of view.

EJ: What is the difference between theater and journalism for you?

ADS: Big difference. At a dinner party a while ago I was sitting next to somebody who is a journalist and has spent a lot of time around the press, and I asked him, "Do you like the president?" He kind of looked at me as if I was really naive and replied that it's not his job to like the president. He has to report objectively. That was during the first course, and at dessert somebody asked me, "Do you like the president?" And I said, "That's not my job. As an actress, my job is to love the president."...My work has been a departure from the theories that say that the characters we play live in us. I don't believe that. I believe in difference, and I believe in the work it takes to make a bridge between the other and myself. That love, a kind of tough love, is this thing that one must use to get there. Other people call it empathy, and I'd say that's the biggest difference between acting and journalism...Actors have no interest in appearing to be dispassionate or disconnected.

EJ: There's an idea, especially in America, that the arts are this rarified part of our culture that exist on an intellectual plane but don't necessarily create social change--that they don't reach out beyond the doors of the theater, for example, or the doors of the museum. But it seems to me that you are trying to fuse art and activism.

ADS: When I sit and I interview somebody, I'm not just looking for any old thing they say. I'm looking for that thing they say which is that poem that they're speaking. And I'm willing to say the poem is going to be as stage-worthy as Shakespeare, for God's sake!...My intention is not to turn art into activism, but to walk that line, that line you're talking about, which is a dangerous line.

Emily Jenkins is the author of Tongue First: Adventures in Physical culture.

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