Transcript: Oh, I always have a long list of interviewees. So right now, I’m trying to get to Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. You know, I want to know how they do what they do. Yeah. I mean the list could be lengthy. I regret that I never got an interview with Mandela, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen. In fact I know it’s not. I would have asked, again, “How did you do that?” . . . what he did. Yeah. I would start with those four people.

Recorded on: 8/22/07

Transcript: Well I’m working on a project now about the human body. And I’ve been interviewing people who are dying. And I’ve been interviewing doctors. And I went to Rwanda and talked to some people 10 years after the genocide. I went to South Africa and talked to people about the pandemic of HIV/AIDS there. And on the other hand, I talked to people who are very, very talented, vibrant people with their bodies, like Lance Armstrong, for example. And I have come to the conclusion that, you know, it’s just not fair that some people get certain burdens, and some people get certain gifts; but that, as somebody said to me the other day, these gifts are randomly delivered. And so then that leaves me with a bigger question. If it isn’t fair . . . And it looks like we’ll be going into a period now where people who have resources will be able to genetically, through genetic therapies, sort of . . . Well, you know, they can enhance things that they may not have. But not everybody will do that. And so that could set up how we started that. The lens through which I’ve seen the world for so long is about making a level playing field. I think we’re gonna move away from that very far. And then it’s kind of like if it’s not fair, what do we do? What should we do? What should we do personally? Will the desire to have things be fair and be equal go away as a human enterprise? You know we look to the law to help us figure out about fairness. On the other hand, we see it all over the world. And we saw in this country that the law can justify misdeeds. So I’ve learned about human nature . . . The good news is that throughout history, even though it hasn’t been fair, there have been people who have worked hard to try to make a situation where many people could thrive when they could have chosen to make a situation where nobody could thrive but them. So it’s good news and it’s bad news. The bad news is that some are more vulnerable than others. The good news is that occasionally, powerful human beings have used their power to make it okay for everybody.

Recorded on: 8/22/07

Transcript: I mean he first and foremost brings a very, very complex study of the human condition. And he can make you laugh and he can make you cry. And he can make you consider political realities in new ways. And he never dies. It’s always relevant. But for me, what was important about Shakespeare was the fact that it all was in the words. It was . . . all the action was in the words. All of . . . all of the humanity he was trying to share was in words. And in fact, you know, in words that were designed in a certain way. So I was interested in the design of Shakespeare’s words, and how that design led to anybody saying those words – a deeper understanding . . . a profound and deep understanding about the human being they were portraying. And in fact that led me directly to thinking that if I were to study the words of a so-called common walking man, and treat it and study it the way that I treated and studied Shakespeare, that I would find something inside of what we call a commonplace person which could be on the stage. And not really in that way that you say, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” but that someone in the course of an hour would come upon something that was so meaningful to them that it could be heroic; and that it could capture the attention of an audience. And so pretty much, you know, Shakespeare led me right to my experiment.

What I had was a question that occupied me for a very long time. So I can tell you what the question was, and I can tell you that even as I still practice around that question, it’s led me to another question that I don’t even know how to work on. But the question I’ve been trying to answer since the first time I ever picked up a Shakespearean text to speak it under the gaze of an authority on Shakespeare . . . I mean, you know, I had spoken some Shakespearean words in other informal ways; but the first time anybody was sort of ever listening to me attempt to speak in Shakespeare was in 1972 or something like that. And so the question that came from that was, “What is the relationship of language to identity?” And that’s what you and I have been talking about. And that question has occupied me for a long time. And now I have a new question, which is, “What is the gap between understanding and action? And what does it take to bridge that gap?” And I don’t know the answer to it, and that’s why . . . That’s the question that I suspect will occupy me now for some years.

Recorded on: 8/22/07

Transcript: I’ve been trying to contribute something about variety that I had hoped – and I haven’t succeeded – would change the very nature of the way theater is produced, and who comes to the theater. You know because the theater is a very segregated place. Most of the people who go to theaters in this country are white people. My generation had many promising directors, and producers, and writers. And they’re not around. They’re not making theater, and it breaks my heart. And I feel in some ways that I haven’t contributed nearly enough in terms of what my thought about that was when I first was studying acting in the theater where everybody on the stage was white, and everybody in the audience was white. And I thought, “That’s so weird!” In San Francisco there’s Asian people up the hill. There’s black people across the bay. There’s every kind of person here. There’s Latinos all over the Mission. How could this theater of this town have everybody white on the stage, unless there was a black guy bringing in a pizza – a character bringing the pizza – everybody else was white? How can that be? So I said well maybe if I figure out a way to bring in more colors of people onto the stage, more colors of people will come to the audience. That hasn’t happened.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well the goal is to tell a story that has multiple points of view for the very reasons that we’ve been discussing; and to, by doing so, indicate on an artistic level that the old idea of the single . . . even the old idea of the single author, if you will, is flawed. Because it takes ultimately many people to tell the story of a community, or the story of a society. So that sense of the auguste author who can come in and speak for women and speak for men, I don’t believe that. There’s a lot . . . Maybe your imagination is sufficient; maybe not, you know? My imagination comes into play; but before doing that, I would like to know how a man feels, or how another woman feels about something. I’m studying that because I understand that I’m one human being with a set of experiences that color my lens. And I’ve always been – since I was a little girl – very interested in how that person across the town, across the street, how they think. And understanding I could never think like they think, but wanting to try to do something about that gap. Not even in a humanistic way. It was really something that bothered me. It was really something I worried about. So first of all I hope that by being present, as 46 people say in Twilight, the play about the Los Angeles riot, and playing a Korean woman whose store was burned to the ground by African-Americans; or playing one of the African-American kids who beat up the white man; or playing Daryl Gates, the very unpopular Chief of Police, then it suggests to an audience that they don’t have to sit in their one position. And by the way, you know when I come out at the end and take my curtain call, I’m still me. So did I really lose anything? No. In fact maybe I gained something. Aesthetically and artistically, what I’ve been trying to contribute is something about details that, you know, maybe there’s a wider variety of human beings than we thought about. And we can tell compelling stories without having to have those same stereotypes that we’ve been thinking about over and over again.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well the first thing is that it is the actual making of language; the actual “in the present” moment sound that a person is making and how they’re making that sound. That’s where identity lives, I think. I don’t think it really lives in . . . Like if you took what I’m saying here and you transcribed it, I don’t think that’s Anna Deveare Smith. But I think that a series of sounds and movements are Anna Deveare Smith. In other words, the outward product of that. And you know your language is close to your breeding. It’s close to your heart. And usually, what I like to listen for is the time when somebody says something in an unusual way. And usually I talk to people for about an hour, and for example if they’re constantly using upward inflections – you know, always speaking up . . . everything that say goes up, which younger people tend to do. As I heard a very accomplished judge say when asked what advice she could give to young women lawyers who are trying to make it, it’s don’t do that. Because what does it saying to the judge if you come forward and say, “Your honor, my client is not guilty.” It sounds like a question, right? So if someone is talking all like that, what I’m going to listen for is the time that they don’t do that. And that’s what I would start to study as a way of characterizing them. Whereas I think a professional mimic or an impressionist would pick the thing they do the most, because that’s what an audience could then identify as that person. So an impressionist doing George Bush is going to try to find the gestures and the, you know, the intimations that he keeps using over and over again. But if I were to study him – and I haven’t really – I’d look for when he did something that wasn’t what we’ve seen.

Question: Language and Individuality

Transcript: Well I would say President Clinton, for example, was . . . I went to Washington and I interviewed 520 people or more. And I was surprised that I would say of those people, the person . . . Clinton was probably among the five who had the most musicality in their language. In other words, in Washington, I would say you begin to find less and less expression than you find in other places because people are very careful about what they say. They’re going to be judged for what they say. They could say the wrong thing or say it the wrong way and never live it down. So they have, as someone said very eloquently what Thomas Jefferson had, which is that Thomas Jefferson could never be . . . Thomas Jefferson could never been found in verbal undress. And so I was . . . And so that kind of verbal dressing makes it harder to find music in the language. I’m trying to find the time that people start to sing. I call it “singing”. Not actually, you know, “la-la-la-la-la,” but they really start to open up rhythmically. More than, again, what’s the text, it’s more about this singing as I call it. And I was surprised to the extent to which Clinton sang. And the other thing about Clinton that I enjoyed was that he brought truth to something that a linguist had actually told me many years ago when I told her what I was trying to do – that is to say a form of getting people to sing – she had said to me, “Well I’m gonna give you three questions that can ensure that that will happen in the course of an hour if you only have an hour to talk to people. And the three questions were: “Have you ever come close to death? Do you know the circumstances of your birth? And have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do?” Now when I first started my whole process, which I call “On the Road: A Search for American Character” – all of my plays are a part of that series – I originally just sat with people who I met on the streets of New York and talked to them about whatever they, you know . . . If they sold milk, I talked about selling milk. Or stick ball in the street in one case, or being a life guard at the Y. I sort of talked to them about what they did, and then somewhere in the interview I’d ask those three questions. And lo and behold, every time I did, people would start this singing that I’m talking about. So when I finally got an interview with President Clinton, which wasn’t easy, and was told that I would have 10 minutes alone with him in the Oval Office, I knew that I had to have a question that would cause him to use the entire 10 minutes without me having to say anything. And the question I picked was a version of one of those three questions. And it was, “Mr. President, do you think you’re being treated like a common criminal?” which is a version of, “Have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do?” He spoke for 35 minutes. And as people, you know, come into the office, “Mr. President, you need to rest your voice now . . .” “Okay, bye!” So I was really happy to see that something that I learned, you know, 30 years before . . . or not quite 30, 27 years before I met him actually was in good stead. I had researchers. I had everything in the world to try to find the question I should ask President Clinton.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well I’ve studied acting, and I’ve been teaching it for a long time. I’ve been teaching it formally since 1973, and I’ve taught in all kinds of places. And sometimes I’ve been required, as would be the case . . . not now in my career, but certainly earlier in my career . . . A faculty, you know . . . A faculty has to kind of achieve something as a group. And so a lot of times I’ve had to teach very traditional things – very traditional – and so I know a lot about the varieties of methods that there are for approaching acting. And I think the best thing I heard about it . . . The three best things I heard about acting was one, one of my teachers said that you can’t really talk about acting directly. Everything that we know to say is couched in metaphors. That’s number one. It’s not like teaching medicine, or teaching architecture, or even music because it has to do with identity. And we don’t really understand so much about it. It’s not something we can touch or feel. And the changes of identities have never been, for example, translated into . . . like music is translated into notes. We haven’t really translated what we do into something that can be constantly replicated with a result we can anticipate. So there’s something about it that’s a little mysterious.

Ethel Merman’s son . . . He was one of the most powerful teachers that I had. He said simply, you know, the actor’s gift is the imagination. And then one very practical and gifted teacher said, you know, acting is the ability to believe that you are someone else. So people have all different ways of talking about it, but the first comment I think is the most honest. It’s all couched in metaphors. And so I studied a variety of methods. People always made fun of me in acting school because I was always taking notes. But I was very interested in “what is this?” How is it again that people can change before my eyes? And along the way of my studying in acting, and also my teaching in acting, I began to see that my students sounded a lot alike. And so I wanted to show them that no human being talks like another human being. There are people who are identical. Like you can have an identical twin of your voice. Like there are people who sound exactly like a sibling in the tone of voice; but nobody talks alike. And so I thought that one place to study identity would be in the actual speech of a given person.

Originally I was going around interviewing people because I wanted to teach something about that – about individuality as it is captured in the actual physiological mechanism of making sounds. We are linguistic animals. And then along the lines of doing that, I’ve developed this method through which I make plays, which is I interview people, I take something that I said, and then I attempt to say exactly what they said more than word for word, but utterance per utterance. Because I have come to see that it’s the way in which the utterance themselves are manipulated that an idea then comes forward. So that’s what I’ve been studying and practicing for a very, very long time. And I have to say the thing that’s unquenchable about me is something I told you about earlier. What I really, really love to do is to listen to people and listen to stories. And so over the past, wow, I guess I have to admit it’s a little more than 30 years now, if I’ve been learning anything, it’s that I’ve been leaning more and more about listening. And I never get tired of it – never get tired.

Well the goal is to tell a story that has multiple points of view for the very reasons that we’ve been discussing; and to, by doing so, indicate on an artistic level that the old idea of the single . . . even the old idea of the single author, if you will, is flawed. Because it takes ultimately many people to tell the story of a community, or the story of a society. So that sense of the auguste author who can come in and speak for women and speak for men, I don’t believe that. There’s a lot . . . Maybe your imagination is sufficient; maybe not, you know? My imagination comes into play; but before doing that, I would like to know how a man feels, or how another woman feels about something. I’m studying that because I understand that I’m one human being with a set of experiences that color my lens. And I’ve always been – since I was a little girl – very interested in how that person across the town, across the street, how they think. And understanding I could never think like they think, but wanting to try to do something about that gap. Not even in a humanistic way. It was really something that bothered me. It was really something I worried about. So first of all I hope that by being present, as 46 people say in Twilight, the play about the Los Angeles riot, and playing a Korean woman whose store was burned to the ground by African-Americans; or playing one of the African-American kids who beat up the white man; or playing Daryl Gates, the very unpopular Chief of Police, then it suggests to an audience that they don’t have to sit in their one position. And by the way, you know when I come out at the end and take my curtain call, I’m still me. So did I really lose anything? No. In fact maybe I gained something. Aesthetically and artistically, what I’ve been trying to contribute is something about details that, you know, maybe there’s a wider variety of human beings than we thought about. And we can tell compelling stories without having to have those same stereotypes that we’ve been thinking about over and over again.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well I didn’t really become involved in the theater until I was in . . . after I got out of college. When I was a younger woman, you know . . . For example, I wanted to be a linguist. And I thought that maybe there was some sort of job that I could have ultimately that would have to do with learning many languages and doing something about these things we’ve been talking about, how people don’t get along very well. And it’s interesting that I wanted to learn other languages and take that into the world, because I could have said well, you know, I wanted to follow on the heels of Martin Luther King and do something about race relations in this country. But I really had a desire to be in the world, and to try to do something about “tribalism”. And I thought that one way to do that . . . and I use “tribalism” in quotations . . . discord between groups. And I thought that language was a part of that somehow. So I guess I thought that being able to talk to one another, as trivial as that sounds, I think I really believed in that possibility as a young woman. And then when I got out of college . . . And when I was in college, a lot of things happened in this country that left many of us in kind of a quandary as to what we should do with ourselves and with the country. Martin Luther King was killed when I was in college. And so I went away to California with the notion that I would so something in social change. But by the time I got there, which was the early ‘70s, the movement was really over. People were just beginning to assemble themselves, I think, to become what became the Yuppies of the 1980s. So that was like over. Nobody was into questioning things anymore. There was a sense that people were just trying to put things back together. And in that period, I happened to go to an acting class pretty much, kind of accidentally. And I thought, “Oh my goodness. Everyone’s changing.” So I thought this would be a great laboratory in which to study change with the expectation that I would then go ahead and do something about social change. But once I got that bug – not so much the bug of acting, I have to say, but more the bug of the study of it – the bug of the process of creativity really took me by storm and changed my life. And so in three years, I sort of redirected my goals completely.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well I can’t remember not being conscious of race. I guess I’d have to have been pretty lingual, because even though most of the people around me were African-American people, there was still a sense when you went into other parts of Baltimore that there were White people. Or for example my grandmother – my maternal grandmother – took my brother and I to . . . and enrolled us in a camp when I was eight and he was six. And everybody in that camp was white except for one African-American girl. My brother had blue eyes and blond hair, so people didn’t always know that he was black. And so, you know, I was very conscious in that camp of not being white, and I was eight years old then. So I think it’s something that in my generation is pretty deeply ingrained. I don’t think that my niece, who is nine, has the same experience. I don’t think . . . She’s conscious, but I don’t think she’s self-conscious in the way that I was, because the message to us was that it was something that, you know, it wasn’t necessarily that great. And so you had to count on the people in your family, your church, and the people who were closer to you to try to make sense of that.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well I was born in an all-black hospital, so that gives you a sense already that there was still such a thing as that. And I suppose there are in some places. So the town was, for all intents and purposes, a segregated town. My mother was in labor for five days. I’m not sure if I’d been in a different hospital . . . if she had been in a different hospital . . . if we had been in a different hospital, if there would have been a kind of different situation. But I sort of came down the birth canal and then turned back up. So I always had the feeling that maybe I saw something that I decided I’d just take a little bit longer coming along. And I went to an elementary school that was also all – at the time – colored children, Negro children. And a lot happened by the time it was time to go to junior high. And I went to a predominantly Jewish junior high and a predominantly white high school. But that didn’t . . . wouldn’t have happened, for example, if I were five years older. And I grew up, in many ways, in a different Baltimore than my mother and my father. And I think that, you know . . . I think one’s past always comes and goes; but now in 2007, what I find myself often calling up about Baltimore is that the people that I grew up around were nice people. And so niceness has become very important to me now. And I find myself thinking about that sort of kindness, love of children, the importance of my church kind of quest for fairness and justice in the nation as a whole, I think. And I think about that a lot, and try on a daily basis to emulate some of that behavior in the way I go about my life.

Well I can’t remember not being conscious of race. I guess I’d have to have been pretty lingual, because even though most of the people around me were African-American people, there was still a sense when you went into other parts of Baltimore that there were White people. Or for example my grandmother – my maternal grandmother – took my brother and I to . . . and enrolled us in a camp when I was eight and he was six. And everybody in that camp was white except for one African-American girl. My brother had blue eyes and blond hair, so people didn’t always know that he was black. And so, you know, I was very conscious in that camp of not being white, and I was eight years old then. So I think it’s something that in my generation is pretty deeply ingrained. I don’t think that my niece, who is nine, has the same experience. I don’t think . . . She’s conscious, but I don’t think she’s self-conscious in the way that I was, because the message to us was that it was something that, you know, it wasn’t necessarily that great. And so you had to count on the people in your family, your church, and the people who were closer to you to try to make sense of that.

Well actually in terms of listening to stories, the listening part, I think I have less of a problem with that because I’ve been doing it for a very long time. And as I say, I sit down with somebody and they could tell me the ceiling is falling. And I’m mostly listening to how they said the ceiling was falling, and I’m missing the point that the ceiling is falling. So I’ve really conditioned myself to go in and listen for what I’m listening for. So in that way I have to say I really . . . People always ask me sort of how do I not judge people and . . . That becomes irrelevant for me, because I’m listening for such a specific thing when I go in. I think what’s harder is how do I train myself out of my habits in order to inhabit them and take on their habits? And that’s hard. And that comes from repetition. It just has to be . . . You know my grandfather told me when I was a kid if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. And that’s really, you know, my acting technique in the sentence; is this belief that if I take someone’s words and repeat them over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, eventually those words are gonna hit my psyche in a place that I understand who they are . . . really understand it, which I wouldn’t understand upon reading it or hearing it for the first time. So I would say the work that really calls for that has to do with reenacting more than listening for the first time.

Recorded on: 8/22/07

Transcript:  Well I think the question, “What can I do?” is a very good question.  To have the courage to go someplace where there’s a problem; and even if you feel that you couldn’t possibly have very much to offer, but that you have on the other hand a feeling that you would like to offer something.  And to have the courage to go to that place or that person and say, “What can I do?  How can I help?”  And “What can I do?” doesn’t just mean “How can I help?”  It can also mean “Is there something for me to do here?  How can I be a part of what you are?  How can I be a part of what you’re doing?”  And so I’ve always felt that “What can I do?” is one of the most elegant questions . . . one of the most eloquent questions of all, which is just slightly different than “How can I help?” and more complicated, too.

Recorded on: 8/22/07

Question: What should we be doing that we’re not?

Transcript: Well I think the collaborations across the boundaries of class and race are really important. I think to keep learning language is essential. I think learning how to work with other people so that you can do bigger projects that, you know, are gonna require more than the single author. I think that people should be rewarded and given support – I mean tangibly. People should make grants to people who want to do projects that require collaboration, and collaboration across race, class and national lines. I think if people start to see that we . . . the word “we” is more important than “I” . . . and if hard dollars start to support those kind of projects, then more people will work that way and come outside of what I call their safe houses of identity where everybody is just like them.

Question: How do we make that happen?

Transcript: Well in real practical terms, my high school was a place where, you know, we did in the time that I grew up, collaborate across our boundaries. You know I think universities that talk about interdisciplinary behavior don’t help that happen. They don’t help it happen. Now a university is like a kind of a “faithdom” of all different kinds of people together – scientists, artists, historians, philosophers, and people who want to turn their people into billionaires. We’re all in the same community. But to get things going across those schools is very hard.

Question: How do we make it global?

Transcript: I see a lot of global initiatives, you know, in business. They figured that out for sure. So let’s try to figure it out in the culture. Let’s go to the businessmen and, you know, ask them to teach us how they did that. Ask them to help us meet some people elsewhere and make the . . . Ask them to fund collaborations, even, you know, cultural collaborations just using where their businesses are based in the world.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript: Well I will quote Cornell West, who has the best definition of not optimism, but hope.  He’s not as interested in optimism and neither am I.  And I must point out to me that I think your question is an American question that Americans always want to know.  They always . . .  In our country, we always wanna know, basically, is it gonna be alright?  I mean that’s what you’re asking me: Is it gonna be alright.  I don’t know.  However, given that fact, I’ll quote Cornell who differentiates between optimism and hope by saying that optimism looks out the window and says, “You know, it looks pretty good out there.  Evidence is . . . based on the evidence, I think it’s alright.  It’s alright.”  Hope looks at the evidence and says, “It doesn’t look good.  It doesn’t look good at all.  I’m gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odd, no guarantee whatsoever.”  And Cornell has respect for the struggle.  If the limitations of my experience gave anything to my lens, it is a love of the struggle, and a respect for the fact that part of the human condition is that we are struggling the way that a baby struggles from crawling, to standing, to walking.  Now that’s a part of the human condition.  So then to embrace not this short kind of idea of optimism . . .  It’s fine.  The fact that, “It looks good.  Let’s go.”  But to actually say, “It looks bad.  Let’s go . . .”  Because if we go now even when it’s bad, we might be able to imagine something powerfully enough that we create leadership because people wanna go after that vision of the future.  And I do think that what art contributes to the whole enterprise is that as the people who have spent time trying to turn imagination into actions, imagination into objects, that many of us would like to bring – especially to the abuse in the time when people only wanna look to see that it looks good, and therefore I’m gonna what I can count on – many of us would like to make a suggestion that causes people to try something hard, and to try to go the other way even if it looks bad.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well I mean I think there are many, obviously. The environment, war, poverty. I’d take just those three; but I suppose where I’d end up having to come forward, given, again, the limitations of my experience, the limitations of my lens, is that I’m always interested in justice. I’m always interested in what are we going to do when it isn’t fair? What are we gonna do? How are we gonna help the vulnerable? How are we gonna keep power in check? How are we gonna keep people from the grips of their own narcissism? How are we gonna do that? How are we gonna remind them that we live in this thing together, and part of our enterprise has to be about making this thing habitable?

Recorded on: 8/22/07

Transcript: Well I’m working on a project now about the human body. And I’ve been interviewing people who are dying. And I’ve been interviewing doctors. And I went to Rwanda and talked to some people 10 years after the genocide. I went to South Africa and talked to people about the pandemic of HIV/AIDS there. And on the other hand, I talked to people who are very, very talented, vibrant people with their bodies, like Lance Armstrong, for example. And I have come to the conclusion that, you know, it’s just not fair that some people get certain burdens, and some people get certain gifts; but that, as somebody said to me the other day, these gifts are randomly delivered. And so then that leaves me with a bigger question. If it isn’t fair . . . And it looks like we’ll be going into a period now where people who have resources will be able to genetically, through genetic therapies, sort of . . . Well, you know, they can enhance things that they may not have. But not everybody will do that. And so that could set up how we started that. The lens through which I’ve seen the world for so long is about making a level playing field. I think we’re gonna move away from that very far. And then it’s kind of like if it’s not fair, what do we do? What should we do? What should we do personally? Will the desire to have things be fair and be equal go away as a human enterprise? You know we look to the law to help us figure out about fairness. On the other hand, we see it all over the world. And we saw in this country that the law can justify misdeeds. So I’ve learned about human nature . . . The good news is that throughout history, even though it hasn’t been fair, there have been people who have worked hard to try to make a situation where many people could thrive when they could have chosen to make a situation where nobody could thrive but them. So it’s good news and it’s bad news. The bad news is that some are more vulnerable than others. The good news is that occasionally, powerful human beings have used their power to make it okay for everybody.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: What I had was a question that occupied me for a very long time.  So I can tell you what the question was, and I can tell you that even as I still practice around that question, it’s led me to another question that I don’t even know how to work on.  But the question I’ve been trying to answer since the first time I ever picked up a Shakespearean text to speak it under the gaze of an authority on Shakespeare . . .  I mean, you know, I had spoken some Shakespearean words in other informal ways; but the first time anybody was sort of ever listening to me attempt to speak in Shakespeare was in 1972 or something like that.  And so the question that came from that was, “What is the relationship of language to identity?”  And that’s what you and I have been talking about.  And that question has occupied me for a long time.  And now I have a new question, which is, “What is the gap between understanding and action?  And what does it take to bridge that gap?”  And I don’t know the answer to it, and that’s why . . .  That’s the question that I suspect will occupy me now for some years.

Questions: What might the answers be?

Transcript: Well I think some of the answers have to do with what I was talking about before, which is that all of us see reality through the lens of our experience.  So that means if we would like to do something new, we have a problem because we can’t even see clearly how to do it.  We can only see how we did it before.  So we’d like to do something now perhaps more challenging and more interesting and do it in a new way; but we only have our old eyes.  And I think when you have our old eyes, we have our old tools.  So that’s on a personal level.  And then you know, on a social level it’s the same thing.  And our leaders often have those old tools, and we look to them to take off . . .  We look to them to tell us how to change our lenses.  They can’t always.  Sometimes they can, but they can’t always.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Question: Is there any person you look to most for inspiration?

Transcript: Many people. Many people in many forms. I hold Schubert dear. Some of the people are dead. I hold Schubert dear. I hold Picasso dear. I hold Lorraine Hansberry dear. I hold Shakespeare dear. I hold Edward P. Jones, who wrote a marvelous novel called “The Known World” about a black man who owned slaves. In fact black people did own slaves. I mean I read his writing, and I hold him dear. I hold Jesse Norman dear. I hold Ed Ruscha dear. I hold William Kentridge, the South African print maker and artist dear. I hold Barney Simon, who ran the Market Theatre – a theater that helped bring apartheid down – dear. I hold John O’Neil, who was a centerpiece of the theater called the “Free Southern Theater” that people . . . actors did plays in the south when they were campaigning to get the vote, and they got shot at. They got sent to jail. I hold them dear. Aaron Sorkin, I hold him dear. The list goes on and on and on. And some of my students, you know, who are trying very hard to do new things. I hold them dear.

Question: How has Shakespeare influenced your work?

Transcript: I mean he first and foremost brings a very, very complex study of the human condition. And he can make you laugh and he can make you cry. And he can make you consider political realities in new ways. And he never dies. It’s always relevant. But for me, what was important about Shakespeare was the fact that it all was in the words. It was . . . all the action was in the words. All of . . . all of the humanity he was trying to share was in words. And in fact, you know, in words that were designed in a certain way. So I was interested in the design of Shakespeare’s words, and how that design led to anybody saying those words – a deeper understanding . . . a profound and deep understanding about the human being they were portraying. And in fact that led me directly to thinking that if I were to study the words of a so-called common walking man, and treat it and study it the way that I treated and studied Shakespeare, that I would find something inside of what we call a commonplace person which could be on the stage. And not really in that way that you say, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” but that someone in the course of an hour would come upon something that was so meaningful to them that it could be heroic; and that it could capture the attention of an audience. And so pretty much, you know, Shakespeare led me right to my experiment.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Well the goal is to tell a story that has multiple points of view for the very reasons that we’ve been discussing; and to, by doing so, indicate on an artistic level that the old idea of the single . . . even the old idea of the single author, if you will, is flawed.  Because it takes ultimately many people to tell the story of a community, or the story of a society.  So that sense of the auguste author who can come in and speak for women and speak for men, I don’t believe that.  There’s a lot . . .  Maybe your imagination is sufficient; maybe not, you know?  My imagination comes into play; but before doing that, I would like to know how a man feels, or how another woman feels about something.  I’m studying that because I understand that I’m one human being with a set of experiences that color my lens.  And I’ve always been – since I was a little girl – very interested in how that person across the town, across the street, how they think.  And understanding I could never think like they think, but wanting to try to do something about that gap.  Not even in a humanistic way.  It was really something that bothered me.  It was really something I worried about.  So first of all I hope that by being present, as 46 people say in Twilight, the play about the Los Angeles riot, and playing a Korean woman whose store was burned to the ground by African-Americans; or playing one of the African-American kids who beat up the white man; or playing Daryl Gates, the very unpopular Chief of Police, then it suggests to an audience that they don’t have to sit in their one position.  And by the way, you know when I come out at the end and take my curtain call, I’m still me.  So did I really lose anything?  No.  In fact maybe I gained something.  Aesthetically and artistically, what I’ve been trying to contribute is something about details that, you know, maybe there’s a wider variety of human beings than we thought about.  And we can tell compelling stories without having to have those same stereotypes that we’ve been thinking about over and over again.  So I’ve been trying to contribute something about variety that I had hoped – and I haven’t succeeded – would change the very nature of the way theater is produced, and who comes to the theater.  You know because the theater is a very segregated place.  Most of the people who go to theaters in this country are white people.  My generation had many promising directors, and producers, and writers.  And they’re not around.  They’re not making theater, and it breaks my heart.  And I feel in some ways that I haven’t contributed nearly enough in terms of what my thought about that was when I first was studying acting in the theater where everybody on the stage was white, and everybody in the audience was white.  And I thought, “That’s so weird!”  In San Francisco there’s Asian people up the hill.  There’s black people across the bay.  There’s every kind of person here.  There’s Latinos all over the Mission.  How could this theater of this town have everybody white on the stage, unless there was a black guy bringing in a pizza – a character bringing the pizza – everybody else was white?  How can that be?  So I said well maybe if I figure out a way to bring in more colors of people onto the stage, more colors of people will come to the audience.  That hasn’t happened.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Question: Beyond a simple title, how would you describe what you do for a living?

Transcript: Well I’ve studied acting, and I’ve been teaching it for a long time. I’ve been teaching it formally since 1973, and I’ve taught in all kinds of places. And sometimes I’ve been required, as would be the case . . . not now in my career, but certainly earlier in my career . . . A faculty, you know . . . A faculty has to kind of achieve something as a group. And so a lot of times I’ve had to teach very traditional things – very traditional – and so I know a lot about the varieties of methods that there are for approaching acting. And I think the best thing I heard about it . . . The three best things I heard about acting was one, one of my teachers said that you can’t really talk about acting directly. Everything that we know to say is couched in metaphors. That’s number one. It’s not like teaching medicine, or teaching architecture, or even music because it has to do with identity. And we don’t really understand so much about it. It’s not something we can touch or feel. And the changes of identities have never been, for example, translated into . . . like music is translated into notes. We haven’t really translated what we do into something that can be constantly replicated with a result we can anticipate. So there’s something about it that’s a little mysterious.

Question: What is acting?

Transcript: Ethel Merman’s son . . . He was one of the most powerful teachers that I had. He said simply, you know, the actor’s gift is the imagination. And then one very practical and gifted teacher said, you know, acting is the ability to believe that you are someone else. So people have all different ways of talking about it, but the first comment I think is the most honest. It’s all couched in metaphors. And so I studied a variety of methods. People always made fun of me in acting school because I was always taking notes. But I was very interested in “what is this?” How is it again that people can change before my eyes? And along the way of my studying in acting, and also my teaching in acting, I began to see that my students sounded a lot alike. And so I wanted to show them that no human being talks like another human being. There are people who are identical. Like you can have an identical twin of your voice. Like there are people who sound exactly like a sibling in the tone of voice; but nobody talks alike. And so I thought that one place to study identity would be in the actual speech of a given person.

Question: What is your approach to acting?

Originally I was going around interviewing people because I wanted to teach something about that – about individuality as it is captured in the actual physiological mechanism of making sounds. We are linguistic animals. And then along the lines of doing that, I’ve developed this method through which I make plays, which is I interview people, I take something that I said, and then I attempt to say exactly what they said more than word for word, but utterance per utterance. Because I have come to see that it’s the way in which the utterance themselves are manipulated that an idea then comes forward. So that’s what I’ve been studying and practicing for a very, very long time. And I have to say the thing that’s unquenchable about me is something I told you about earlier. What I really, really love to do is to listen to people and listen to stories. And so over the past, wow, I guess I have to admit it’s a little more than 30 years now, if I’ve been learning anything, it’s that I’ve been leaning more and more about listening. And I never get tired of it – never get tired.

Question: How do you understand language?

Transcript: Well the first thing is that it is the actual making of language; the actual “in the present” moment sound that a person is making and how they’re making that sound. That’s where identity lives, I think. I don’t think it really lives in . . . Like if you took what I’m saying here and you transcribed it, I don’t think that’s Anna Deveare Smith. But I think that a series of sounds and movements are Anna Deveare Smith. In other words, the outward product of that. And you know your language is close to your breeding. It’s close to your heart. And usually, what I like to listen for is the time when somebody says something in an unusual way. And usually I talk to people for about an hour, and for example if they’re constantly using upward inflections – you know, always speaking up . . . everything that say goes up, which younger people tend to do. As I heard a very accomplished judge say when asked what advice she could give to young women lawyers who are trying to make it, it’s don’t do that. Because what does it saying to the judge if you come forward and say, “Your honor, my client is not guilty.” It sounds like a question, right? So if someone is talking all like that, what I’m going to listen for is the time that they don’t do that. And that’s what I would start to study as a way of characterizing them. Whereas I think a professional mimic or an impressionist would pick the thing they do the most, because that’s what an audience could then identify as that person. So an impressionist doing George Bush is going to try to find the gestures and the, you know, the intimations that he keeps using over and over again. But if I were to study him – and I haven’t really – I’d look for when he did something that wasn’t what we’ve seen.

Question: Can you identify notable communicators that you have talked to and any surprising insights?

Transcript: Oh, that’s a really wonderful question. Well I would say President Clinton, for example, was . . . I went to Washington and I interviewed 520 people or more. And I was surprised that I would say of those people, the person . . . Clinton was probably among the five who had the most musicality in their language. In other words, in Washington, I would say you begin to find less and less expression than you find in other places because people are very careful about what they say. They’re going to be judged for what they say. They could say the wrong thing or say it the wrong way and never live it down. So they have, as someone said very eloquently what Thomas Jefferson had, which is that Thomas Jefferson could never be . . . Thomas Jefferson could never been found in verbal undress. And so I was . . . And so that kind of verbal dressing makes it harder to find music in the language. I’m trying to find the time that people start to sing. I call it “singing”. Not actually, you know, “la-la-la-la-la,” but they really start to open up rhythmically. More than, again, what’s the text, it’s more about this singing as I call it. And I was surprised to the extent to which Clinton sang. And the other thing about Clinton that I enjoyed was that he brought truth to something that a linguist had actually told me many years ago when I told her what I was trying to do – that is to say a form of getting people to sing – she had said to me, “Well I’m gonna give you three questions that can ensure that that will happen in the course of an hour if you only have an hour to talk to people. And the three questions were: “Have you ever come close to death? Do you know the circumstances of your birth? And have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do?” Now when I first started my whole process, which I call “On the Road: A Search for American Character” – all of my plays are a part of that series – I originally just sat with people who I met on the streets of New York and talked to them about whatever they, you know . . . If they sold milk, I talked about selling milk. Or stick ball in the street in one case, or being a life guard at the Y. I sort of talked to them about what they did, and then somewhere in the interview I’d ask those three questions. And lo and behold, every time I did, people would start this singing that I’m talking about. So when I finally got an interview with President Clinton, which wasn’t easy, and was told that I would have 10 minutes alone with him in the Oval Office, I knew that I had to have a question that would cause him to use the entire 10 minutes without me having to say anything. And the question I picked was a version of one of those three questions. And it was, “Mr. President, do you think you’re being treated like a common criminal?” which is a version of, “Have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do?” He spoke for 35 minutes. And as people, you know, come into the office, “Mr. President, you need to rest your voice now . . .” “Okay, bye!” So I was really happy to see that something that I learned, you know, 30 years before . . . or not quite 30, 27 years before I met him actually was in good stead. I had researchers. I had everything in the world to try to find the question I should ask President Clinton.

Question: Is there absolute truth?

Transcript: No. No, I think, you know . . . I can never remember whether it’s in Mark or John in the Bible where Pontius Pilate is supposedly seeking truth about Christ. And you know, and he says, “What is truth?” You know, “Is it the truth” . . . You know, “Is the truth about this man, or is the truth about what will happen if I make the wrong decision,” for example? I mean I’m quoting it very, very badly here. So I think that there probably is not absolute truth; but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek to find facts. It doesn’t mean that we should lie. I think the reason lying becomes so serious is because to make a society to do things . . . make buildings stand, to do a heart transplant, to do anything that is important, we have to know that the people around us are telling us things that are real, if not true. We have to be able to rely on the things that we are told as fact because we wanna believe that someone went and tried something first and therefore learned of that. And then they come and say, “Well I’ve been outside, and it’s raining today,” right? So we’re willing to trust that and make decisions upon that fact. So I don’t know if I’m really a seeker of truth in terms of is someone telling me truth. I think I’m really a student of . . . I’m a student of human beings. Yeah, I think that’s a better way of putting it than I’m a seeker of truth. I’m a student of human beings and their motivations, and what causes them to do what they say they’re gonna do, or what gets in the way of that.

Question: How do you account for different perspectives that people have when they share the same experience?

Transcript: I think it’s very hard, in fact, not to see reality through the lens of your own experience. And I also think it’s difficult to put past experiences behind us – past experiences that become that lens. It’s very hard to change that lens. We don’t have a version of surgery to help us do that. We used to think that things like psychotherapy could help with it; but now most people go to a psycho pharmacologist. And they’re less interested in the process of telling their myths to someone who should understand them, and tearing those myths apart when they don’t help. You know one of my favorite artists is and was Jacob Lawrence. And I interviewed him when he was quite old, and he was talking to me about growing up uptown in Harlem. And I was very interested in how somebody who grew up uptown in Harlem would have been able to mingle as well as he did. He was embraced by the downtown art crowd. That is to say the white, you know, mainstream art crowd embraced his work. And you know, he talked about how when he was a boy, if a white man would have walked on the street in Harlem, or if he were to go downtown and see white men walking on the street, he would automatically think to himself, “That’s a lyncher.” So to him every white man was a potential lyncher; just like there would have been white people who had believed that every black man was a potential rapist or thief. Well he thought every white man was a potential lyncher. And so I said to him, I said, “Well how did you get over that?” And he said, “Well, you know . . . He said the simplest thing, but it had such resonance, I thought. He said, “You know, it’s just like when you were a child and you believed that there are ghosts and goblins under the bed, and then one day you don’t.” And so many of us have different kinds of ghosts and goblins. We might think that we aren’t so attractive because somebody told us that. Or we might think that we’re very attractive; that we should be on display because somebody told us that. Or we might think that we have to lie if we’ve done something wrong. So we have these things . . . these past experiences that begin to almost predict for us how we’re gonna behave in any given situation. And I think it’s very hard to re-craft that, and I’m very interested in how people either succeed in re-crafting those things or not.

Question: How do you approach people without preconceptions?

Transcript: Well actually in terms of listening to stories, the listening part, I think I have less of a problem with that because I’ve been doing it for a very long time. And as I say, I sit down with somebody and they could tell me the ceiling is falling. And I’m mostly listening to how they said the ceiling was falling, and I’m missing the point that the ceiling is falling. So I’ve really conditioned myself to go in and listen for what I’m listening for. So in that way I have to say I really . . . People always ask me sort of how do I not judge people and . . . That becomes irrelevant for me, because I’m listening for such a specific thing when I go in. I think what’s harder is how do I train myself out of my habits in order to inhabit them and take on their habits? And that’s hard. And that comes from repetition. It just has to be . . . You know my grandfather told me when I was a kid if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. And that’s really, you know, my acting technique in the sentence; is this belief that if I take someone’s words and repeat them over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, eventually those words are gonna hit my psyche in a place that I understand who they are . . . really understand it, which I wouldn’t understand upon reading it or hearing it for the first time. So I would say the work that really calls for that has to do with reenacting more than listening for the first time.

Recorded on: 8/15/07

Transcript: Anna Deavere Smith. Actress/playwright.

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Transcript: Well I was born in an all-black hospital, so that gives you a sense already that there was still such a thing as that. And I suppose there are in some places. So the town was, for all intents and purposes, a segregated town. My mother was in labor for five days. I’m not sure if I’d been in a different hospital . . . if she had been in a different hospital . . . if we had been in a different hospital, if there would have been a kind of different situation. But I sort of came down the birth canal and then turned back up. So I always had the feeling that maybe I saw something that I decided I’d just take a little bit longer coming along. And I went to an elementary school that was also all – at the time – colored children, Negro children. And a lot happened by the time it was time to go to junior high. And I went to a predominantly Jewish junior high and a predominantly white high school. But that didn’t . . . wouldn’t have happened, for example, if I were five years older. And I grew up, in many ways, in a different Baltimore than my mother and my father. And I think that, you know . . . I think one’s past always comes and goes; but now in 2007, what I find myself often calling up about Baltimore is that the people that I grew up around were nice people. And so niceness has become very important to me now. And I find myself thinking about that sort of kindness, love of children, the importance of my church kind of quest for fairness and justice in the nation as a whole, I think. And I think about that a lot, and try on a daily basis to emulate some of that behavior in the way I go about my life.

Question: Who was your greatest influence when you were young?

Transcript: Well it was really a community that I grew up in. You know, in terms of my . . . the culture that was right around me, that is my . . . the people who I would call my friends and family, for the most part they were colored people. And my mother and father had a big effect on me. My paternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother had a big effect on me. There was a woman next door called Ms. Johnson who was actually a very large woman – maybe she weighed about 400 pounds – she had a huge effect on me. She was a great story teller, and I used to ask her to tell me stories all the time. And when kids were out playing – we didn’t have stick ball in the street – but our version of softball or baseball in the back alley, I would most likely be found talking to Ms. Johnson and asking her to tell me often the same stories over and over again. And so I think that my desire to hear a story, which came from when I was very young, is still with me now and has a huge influence on me. The minister of my church and his wife have a big effect on me. And then I think the tougher part had to do with my school in junior high, because the kids in that school really stayed in groups that had mostly to do with race and social class. So for example, even among the Jewish kids, it was really clear to me they had a certain pecking order. And the kids whose families had recently come, for example, from Eastern Europe were segregated away from those who were more assimilated. And that really bothered me. And you know when something bothers you, you can, on the one hand, turn it into something, which I’ve tried to do in my life. But there’s another way in which the effect of it never really goes away, and you sort of see those same things in your own life. And certainly we live in a world that may not be segregated in the way that parts of this country were; but we live in a very tribal kind of world now where there seems to be . . . there seems to be an almost insurmountable challenge in terms of how do we soften those borders and boundaries.

Question: When did you first become conscious of race?

Transcript: Well I can’t remember not being conscious of race. I guess I’d have to have been pretty lingual, because even though most of the people around me were African-American people, there was still a sense when you went into other parts of Baltimore that there were White people. Or for example my grandmother – my maternal grandmother – took my brother and I to . . . and enrolled us in a camp when I was eight and he was six. And everybody in that camp was white except for one African-American girl. My brother had blue eyes and blond hair, so people didn’t always know that he was black. And so, you know, I was very conscious in that camp of not being white, and I was eight years old then. So I think it’s something that in my generation is pretty deeply ingrained. I don’t think that my niece, who is nine, has the same experience. I don’t think . . . She’s conscious, but I don’t think she’s self-conscious in the way that I was, because the message to us was that it was something that, you know, it wasn’t necessarily that great. And so you had to count on the people in your family, your church, and the people who were closer to you to try to make sense of that.

Question: What did you think you would be doing professionally when you were growing up?

Transcript: Well I didn’t really become involved in the theater until I was in . . . after I got out of college. When I was a younger woman, you know . . . For example, I wanted to be a linguist. And I thought that maybe there was some sort of job that I could have ultimately that would have to do with learning many languages and doing something about these things we’ve been talking about, how people don’t get along very well. And it’s interesting that I wanted to learn other languages and take that into the world, because I could have said well, you know, I wanted to follow on the heels of Martin Luther King and do something about race relations in this country. But I really had a desire to be in the world, and to try to do something about “tribalism”. And I thought that one way to do that . . . and I use “tribalism” in quotations . . . discord between groups. And I thought that language was a part of that somehow. So I guess I thought that being able to talk to one another, as trivial as that sounds, I think I really believed in that possibility as a young woman. And then when I got out of college . . . And when I was in college, a lot of things happened in this country that left many of us in kind of a quandary as to what we should do with ourselves and with the country. Martin Luther King was killed when I was in college. And so I went away to California with the notion that I would so something in social change. But by the time I got there, which was the early ‘70s, the movement was really over. People were just beginning to assemble themselves, I think, to become what became the Yuppies of the 1980s. So that was like over. Nobody was into questioning things anymore. There was a sense that people were just trying to put things back together. And in that period, I happened to go to an acting class pretty much, kind of accidentally. And I thought, “Oh my goodness. Everyone’s changing.” So I thought this would be a great laboratory in which to study change with the expectation that I would then go ahead and do something about social change. But once I got that bug – not so much the bug of acting, I have to say, but more the bug of the study of it – the bug of the process of creativity really took me by storm and changed my life. And so in three years, I sort of redirected my goals completely.

Recorded on: 8/22/07