Wearing The Words: An Interview With Anna Deavere Smith - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

Wearing the Words: An Interview with Anna Deavere Smith - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 8/30/19, 5*24 PM
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MAGAZINE
SPE C I A L S EC TI O N
SOC I E T Y & E N VI RO N M E N T
Wearing the Words: An Interview with Anna

Deavere Smith
Dharma, Diversity, and Race
By Tricycle
FA L L 1 9 9 4
Actress, playwright, and performance artist Anna Deavere Smith is best known for her
Obie Award-winning Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities.
Fires in the Mirror, which received a Drama Desk Award, is a one-woman show created
from forty-six different character voices all relating the explosion of racial tensions
between the black and Hasidic communitites in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991. Her
latest work, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a performance piece dealing with the Rodney
King case and subsequent riots, is part of the same ongoing series of performances
https://tricycle.org/magazine/wearing-words-interview-anna-deavere-smith/ Page 1 of 9
based on interviewing, and then performing, people involved in specific controversial,

public events. Smith is currently the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of the Arts at Stanford
University. Tricycle caught up with Smith in Manhattan, following the Broadway run of
Twilight.
From the opening performance of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, in which she recreates the characters involved in
the 1992 L.A. riots. From left, Smith as Angela King, the aunt of Rodney King;
Reginald Denny, the truck driver beaten during the riots; and Young-Soon
Han, whose liquor store was looted and burned. Twilight photos by Jay
Thompson.
Tricycle: One of the things we talk about in Buddhism could be called “the
position of no position,” in which liberation is encouraged, in part, by not
being attached to a particular point of view. That seems to be the structural
dynamic of your work.
Smith: I do believe that character is a process, that truth is a process, and I am not
interested in winning and losing. There was recently an article in Newsweek by Joe Klein,
a senior political editor, in which he talked about Clinton. One of the criticisms he has of
Clinton is that Clinton talks about character, for example, as a process rather than as a
fixed thing. Klein thinks that is disgusting. I think a person like that would be very
disturbed by me.
Tricycle: What is the political benefit of not taking a position?
Smith: You know more. That’s political power, I would think.
Tricycle: Do you have an agenda for your audience?
Smith: Well, I don’t know if I have an agenda, but I have a desire. The desire is to create
theater that is fuller than traditional theater—that allows us to see more kinds of people
represented—and to attract to that theater a more diverse audience of people. Diverse
not just in terms of race but in terms of a social class and lifestyle. To try and get people
to think of theater as more than this precious thing that only certain people can see,
more than high art, but as communities.
Tricycle: By moving through all those diffirent characters—not a fixed character

but the process of character—you are challenging anybody who thinks that they
have only one place to stand. And most people are thinking that they’re
standing in one place. Is there a relationship between that sort of fixedness and
racism?
Smith: Oh, yes. White racism is about people who don’t feel so bad about fixed things.
But white racism is a fixed thing, and it is perpetuated because of fixedness. Anything
that we can do that causes people to desire movement more than fixedness is going to
disrupt racism. It doesn’t mean that I’ll never take a position. But I don’t think I’ll ever
allow people to stay fixed. Maybe because I know that nobody is fixed.
Photos by Sally Boon.
Tricycle: Where does that come from, in your own experience?
Smith: It was probably something in the way I was raised. My father was a very
opinionated person. My mother was not. The men in my family talked a lot. My mother
never participated in their big opinionated discussions. And neither did I, because a lot
of times what they were saying was absolute nonsense.
This work started as an experiment in listening to language as evidence of identity, and

I’ve found that the place where a person is coming into character is exactly the place
where linguistically they start to fall apart. Where they are efficient in saying the right
thing is not where they are in character, and I know that because I wear the words. The
place I feel the fullness of a person is where words fail, because they breathe more and
they are creating language—not the language that
they learned. They are stuck with themselves to create utterances.
Tricycle: How do you think that people can best take this message of
nonfixedness to heart?
Smith: First of all, what we can do is to be ready—because it’s inevitable. And we might
ultimately be very useful to society. Not activists, but very useful. Because the activist is
trying to push someone into the future. I think there will come a time whcn there will be
a present in which we will be very useful. And that is because I believe instability and
nonfixedness are inevitable, are reality. One way to deal with fear is to accept it.
Acknowledge it. To give it space.
Tricycle: What is your hope for race relations in this country?
Smith: I have little hopes. Small hopes. The first, to get people to not be afraid of talking
about race. And it’s not always fear that keeps people away; a lot of people aren’t
interested. Maybe it’s repressed fear. And I know nothing is going to happen until pcople
feel that need to be interested. It has to be demonstrated that there is a need for it. My
desire is for people to have equal opportunities, responsibilities, and voice. That’s why I
do forty-six voices in Fires—because I want to have more voices heard. My feeling is that
no one voice should have authority.
Tricycle: What is interesting about your presentation of many voices is your

commitment to equality among them, despite the absence of that equality in
real life.
Smith: I am often dismayed that the big voice always drowns out the small voice. If we
have any hope for race relations, I think it’s creating more and more of a collective of
small voices—giving up the idea of the single voice to create unlikely collaborations of
little voices. Actually, I recently found myself longing for that really sappy Coke
commercial from the seventies which had such great appeal—this big chorus of people
singing, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…. “
Tricycle: You know they re-shot that commercial last year and it failed.
Smith: Did it? Well, that’s what we have to find.
From left, Smith as Sgt. Charles Duke of the L.A.P.D., Twilight: Los Angeles,
1992. In Fires in the Mirror, Smith re-created characters from the tensions in
Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Conrad Mohammed, the New York minister
representing Louis Farrakhan; Monique “Big Mo” Matthews, a Los Angeles
rap artist. Fires photos by William Gibson.
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Wearing the Words: An Interview with Anna Deavere Smith - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 8/30/19, 5*24 PM

Donate Online Courses Log In SUBSCR IBE

Wearing the Words: An Interview with Anna

based on interviewing, and then performing, people involved in speciﬁc controversial,

From the opening performance of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show

Tricycle: What is the political beneﬁt of not taking a position?

Smith: You know more. That’s political power, I would think.

Tricycle: Do you have an agenda for your audience?

Tricycle: By moving through all those diﬃrent characters—not a ﬁxed character

Photos by Sally Boon.

Tricycle: Where does that come from, in your own experience?

This work started as an experiment in listening to language as evidence of identity, and

Tricycle: What is your hope for race relations in this country?

no one voice should have authority.

Tricycle: What is interesting about your presentation of many voices is your

Smith: Did it? Well, that’s what we have to ﬁnd.

Get Daily Dharma in your email

Your email here S I GN UP

1. Buddha’s “Theory of Everything”

2. Sogyal Rinpoche Dead at 72

3. The Buddhist Roots of Hatha Yoga

5. What Exactly Is Vipassana Meditation?

The Dharmic Life

Your email here S I GN UP

Copyright 2019. Tricycle. All rights reserved. Design by Point Five.

1 article remaining New to

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