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Actress addresses life's questions

With imitations, Smith urges students to listen

By Christian Schmidt
The Daily Cougar

Just listen.

Actress Anna Deveare Smith stressed the importance of listening Wednesday night at the Moores Opera House as part of the Farfel Distinguished Lecture Series. Smithis lecture also explored topics of race, justice and finding a central question to base oneis life around.

Her book, Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change, is a series of interviews with a variety of people about issues of race, class and gender and controversial events.

Smith has been widely acclaimed for her work as an actress, on stage, television and in movies. She starred in the recently canceled television program Presidio Med and was a supporting actor on The West Wing. She has had movie appearances in Philadelphia, The American President and Dave.

She has received Obie awards, a MacArthur genius grant and been nominated for the Tony award and the Pulitzer Prize.

During her lecture, Smith performed 10 vignettes from several of her works, playing no fewer than 17 characters during the course of her evening. For her shows, Smith has conducted thousands of interviews of people of all ages, all races and all walks of life.

For her shows, Smith performs segments from the interviews, taking on the voice and mannerisms of the people she interviews. In some of her plays, she performs several dozen characters during the course of a few hours.

Smith said she developed her style by listening to the language of people around her, so different from the rehearsed lines she heard and performed in plays.

"It seemed to me that everyone spoke in a sort of organic poem, and I thought that in those poems might be the secret to actually causing change," Smith said.

On Wednesday night, Smith performed as radio announcer Studs Terkel, a tour guide at Monticello (Thomas Jeffersonis home), documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, a Jewish woman in Brooklyn, former Texas governor Ann Richards, a female prisoner, a Korean liquor store owner in Los Angeles whose store was destroyed in the 1992 riots, Harvard professor Cornell West, and eight of the jurors from the second trial of police officers accused of beating Rodney King.

"We live in what I call safe houses of identity, and we like to live with our own kind is basically what it is," Smith said. "But I want to propose to you, especially in the condition of the world today, that some of you come out of your safe houses of identity, come out into what you donit know, into the middle of the world. But I will warn you that itis not safe, that you canit go back home once youive been out there."

Smith recounted the experience that first opened her eyes to the theater. During her first acting class, her teacher gave an assignment to "take 14 lines of Shakespeare and say them over and over again until something happened."

Smith said that assignment ultimately led to the defining question of her life: "What is the relationship of language to identity?" The college experience should be about clearing things away to find that central question, Smith said.

Smith closed her lecture by taking questions from the audience before signing books at a reception following the lecture.
 

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