Professor Anna Deveare
Smith:
Playwright, Actress, Educator
by Joan Baum, Ph.D.
Though
she can easily lay claim to a number of professional lives—playwright, winner
of a 1996 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant,
stage, film, TV star, educator—Anna Deveare Smith says
that the word “actress” best describes her work,
though the media keep referring to her first as a “performance
artist,” a phrase she feels is politically charged
and that suggests she might be a “provocateur.” No
way. Although her award-winning plays Fires in the Mirror (1991)
and Twilight: Los Angeles (1994) tackle issues of race and community in America, they
do so by taking on interview-based voices and words of characters
on all sides, depicting with mimic brilliance diverse points
of view. What “provocation” exists is the impulse
to think.
She thinks
of herself as someone who “engages” others,
whether they are the audience who has come to see her theatrically
groundbreaking one-woman shows or her students at NYU, where
she is a tenured professor in the Tisch School of the Arts
and an adjunct in the School of Law, teaching a course on the
art of listening. At NYU she is also continuing the work she
started at Harvard, as founder of the Institute on the Arts & Civic
Dialogue, which has as its mission “trying to think about
what art [can] do to convene people and get [them] talking
a fuller way than they might if they were basing all thought,
conversation, and action on what they were reading in newspapers
and seeing on television….” Articulate, exacting
in her choice of words, Anna Deveare Smith draws a keen distinction
between those who see her in the theatre and the freshmen and
graduate students whom she teaches every other semester. “Students
definitely are not audiences.” Audiences expect a finished
product, she says, and constitute an unseen, anonymous public
before whom she performs rehearsed (though seemingly improvisational)
social commentary. Students—her students—have to
be known and then she can draw them into a kind of Socratic
dialogue. With students, she points out, it is she who is the
audience, appreciating and challenging them to “deal
with darkness, ambiguity, anxiety.”
What a different
environment from when she went to Beaver College in the sixties
and was one of 7 “nice
Negro girls” in her freshman class. Colleges, then, didn't
encourage the kind of engagement she feels is essential, but
those who sought it, found it on the fringes of university
life. She was an “active citizen.” Teaching came
if not easily (“it's hard work”) then inevitably:
her mother and her aunts were all teachers. Prompted, she recalls
one of her most satisfying moments in a teaching career that
goes back 30 years—when a student complimented her on
having been “brave” enough to let go of being the
one and only authority in the classroom. Perhaps one reason
the comment stands out is that it reflects the perception that
inherent in all good teaching is risk taking. Students today,
she says, are less liberal and not as trusting as she thought
they would be, given her celebrity. They come in with pre-
and misconceptions about her. “I have to tell them I
am not the National Security Advisor, I just act on The
West Wing.” She's also critical of college as much too expensive and consumer
driven.
Education needs to be about questions and inclusion.
She cites as people she particularly admires, Maxine Greene,
philosopher of aesthetic education, who held that education
should show what we don't and can't know, and the pace-setting
Harvard professor of law, Lani Guinier, who recently wrote
about affirmative action ignoring the poor. The very afternoon Education
Update caught up with Anna
Deveare Smith, she had just come from a meeting of the Fund
for Public Schools (“public schools are at the core of
democracy”). She thinks that some collaboration between
public and private schools would be advantageous. Meanwhile,
she hopes to influence those who might make such decisions
to get there by questioning themselves and others. With this
tactic the teacher and the actress meet as one.#