Theater Review—

Portraying Real Human Beings, Smith Is At Her Very Best

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — Let Me Down Easy, a one-woman show written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, is described in the notes for her current production at Long Wharf Theatre as an exploration of the “resiliency and vulnerability of the human body.”

A gifted actress, familiar to watchers of television’s The West Wing, Ms Smith is also a playwright famous for two plays dissecting racial conflicts of the 1990s — Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities and Twilight: Lost Angeles, 1992.

In addition, she is a teacher, journalist, and social critic, who has traveled the world over, interviewing all kinds of people and using their words to create the various identities she assumes on stage.

It is the juxtaposition of these identities (I won’t call them characters, because they are real people, speaking in their own words) that provides the dynamic dramatic structure of the play. Using the barest of props — a lab coat, an African dashiki, a cowboy hat, a battered trumpet — Ms Smith transforms herself into nearly thirty different individuals — male and female, black and white, old and young, rich and poor, powerful and humble,  doctor and patient, American, African, Indian, and so forth.

Let Me Down Easy was originally commissioned as a teaching tool for Yale School of Medicine. As presented in its Long Wharf premiere, the play uses its first hour for a somewhat whimsical and often funny examination of what their body means to people whose whole focus is on their physicality.

Ms Smith morphs seamlessly from Lance Armstrong, supermodel Lauren Hutton and a rodeo bull rider describing his pain threshold, to Washington Post sports writer Sally Jenkins commenting on Marion Jones, Roger Clemens and performance enhancing drugs, and even playwright Eve Ensler, talking about “living in her vagina.”

If that were all, it would be a supremely clever display of theatrical pyrotechnics, but hardly enough to justify the production’s 2½-hour length. Then, in the second act, as she draws upon her journeys across Africa, to a cancer hospital in Texas, to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and back to Yale, the ambitious scope of this work begins to come clear.

From the genocide in Rwanda and the brutalization of children in Uganda to the abandonment of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and the relentless depredations of a disease that even the rich and famous cannot escape, Ms Smith is portraying real human beings confronting mortality. From former Texas Governor Ann Richards and TV personality Joel Siegal, to a doctor in a in New Orleans Charity Hospital who suddenly realizes that her helpless patients are not going to be evacuated, and the director of an AIDS orphanage who describes her efforts to comfort each dying child, Ms Smith becomes, in front of our eyes, people who are going to die, or watch their loved ones die, or see their patients suffer. Responding by turns with anger, resignation, disbelief, gallows humor, pity and compassion, each person brings us into the intimacy of their experience.

In addition to being an exploration of this bodily vulnerability, however, Ms Smith uses her material to proclaim a clear condemnation of things that can be helped, namely the American two tiered health care system wherein “who is going to pay for it” has become more important than “how can we help this patient?” From there it becomes a reasonable extension to protest the generalized abandonment of the poor, the underclass, and the nameless victims of the epidemics of violence and disease that continue to ravage Africa. By giving these people names, and voices, Ms Smith forces us to consider their humanity as so real that we can’t just fold up the newspaper and forget about them.

The cumulative effect of this work is astounding. The power of Ms Smith’s performance is further enhanced by the staging: the use of Jan Hartley’s continually changing projected background photography, David Bunries’ sound design, David Lander’s lighting, David Rockwell’s set (whose jumble of mud colored artifacts beneath the stage platform becomes understandable only in the second act), and Stephen Wadworth’s direction.

Anna Deavere Smith was an early recipient of a MacArthur Award, a lot of money given to people who are recognized as being geniuses, so that they will be free to do whatever it is they want to do. That was a very wise decision on the part of the judges. She is as good as it gets.

(Performances of this world premiere continue until February 3, with performances Tuesday through Sunday evenings, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Tickets are $31.25 to $61.25. Additional information and reservations are available by calling 203-787-4282 or visiting LongWharf.org.)