The performance artist Anna Deavere Smith is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, if you see what I mean. Of course, Walter Cronkite is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, as he was of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. But as the great anchorman sails into the sunset, Smith is taking on Cronkite-like dimensions, which is to say she has become a public personage festooned with honors and awards, universally revered, a sage to some and a saint to others but to all right-thinking persons a figure whose every act and pronouncement is beyond criticism. She is, like Cronkite, unassailable, though no one can say why.
Smith is not as famous as Cronkite, needless to say, for she plays to a much smaller audience, in a much smaller venue. Now forty-six years old, she spent the 1980s performing a series of one-woman shows — a “body of work,” as she puts it, entitled On the Road: A Search for American Character. She splashed into public consciousness in 1991, with a one-woman show, Fires in the Mirror, about the race riots in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and followed it up in 1993 with a one-woman show about the race riots in Los Angeles, Twilight: Los Angeles. She has now come to Washington’s Arena Stage with her first full-blown theatrical production — a more-than-one-woman show, complete with a troupe of actors, stage sets, intermissions, lots of props, the works.
It is fitting that House Arrest: First Edition debuted in Washington. For one thing, the play is ostensibly about Washington political culture, specifically the office of the president. For another, Washington is a place where people who perform badly in their previous jobs are often rewarded with advancement, acquiring radio shows (Ollie North, Mary Matalin), lucrative lobbying firms (Robert Packwood), even cabinet posts (Robert McNamara, Warren Christopher, et al.). True to the spirit of the city, Anna Deavere Smith has come to Washington and failed up.
But let Douglas Wager, Arena’s artistic director, explain: “Anna Deavere Smith holds a vision as a theater artist, which is to search for our American character through the art and craft of acting, using the language and behavior of our historic and present cultural identity. This play promises to take us thrillingly beyond the habitual practice of our craft towards a new American theater.” In other words, House Arrest: First Edition is a mess. But the mainstreaming of Anna Deavere Smith has been revealing nonetheless.
Smith’s failure in her first large-scale effort will surprise the critics, assuming they acknowledge it. Confronted with her work, they are often seized by a delirious case of blurbitis: “dazzling,” “extraordinary,” “overpowering.” She seems never to have gotten a bad review. “She is a performance artist the way the Hope Diamond is a rock,” said the Washington Post earlier this year. “She is the ultimate impressionist: She does people’s souls,” said the New York Times. “The most exciting individual in American theatre right now is Anna Deavere Smith,” said Newsweek after Twilight opened. “What she has accomplished is an American masterpiece. . . . This is as close as our culture can come to the impact of Homer.”
The difference is that Homer never won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Smith of course did — only one among many honors certifying her as such. Last year, the Ford Foundation named her its first “artist-in-residence. ” Her last two plays were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She is a tenured professor of drama at Stanford, and has held fellowships at Yale and Harvard. She cannot cross a street in New York City without being nominated for a Tony or an Obie. Her shows are filmed and aired by PBS. Earlier this month, Harvard announced that it was spending an initial grant of $ 1.5 million to create a dramatic institute around Smith, “a hybrid between an artists colony and a think tank.”
As with Cronkite, whose portentous baritone and billowy jowls convinced vast numbers of Americans that he possessed a singular intellectual seriousness, however implausibly, there is a kernel of talent around which the cult of Anna Deavere Smith has been constructed. Her gifts are real enough, but they are for mimicry and journalism. To concoct her shows she tapes interviews with scores of people — scholars, celebrities, ordinary Joes and Janes — and then edits the transcripts into brief monologues. She selects thirty or so of these to perform, and juxtaposes them to achieve various dramatic or comic effects.
Published in book form, the monologues are laid out in broken lines suggesting a kind of free verse, as though archy and mehitabel had suddenly gone nuts. On stage, however, she shifts characters with apparent ease, from Korean shopkeepers to young crack addicts to Lubavitcher rabbis and suburban matrons. Although she’s black, the performer she most resembles is the comic Lily Tomlin, minus (alas) the jokes. On occasion the mimicry is uncannily precise, but more often it is simply a distraction. And while she recites her subjects verbatim, the impressions occasionally manifest that greatest of contemporary horribles, the ethnic stereotype. Her impersonation of Al Sharpton, in Fires in the Mirror, sounded like Steppin Fetchit after a night of freebasing. And when she played a Jewish housewife from Brooklyn, she might have been a drag queen doing Barbra Streisand.
Fires and Twilight were thus not so much plays as impressionistic documentaries — works of journalism, loosely defined, in which a succession of subjects discussed the question of race in America. You could get the same thing from Dateline NBC; you’d have to put up with Stone Phillips, but at least he doesn’t do the annoying impersonations. By contrast, House Arrest is far more ambitious than the earlier works. It is meant to be a real play, like the kind they do, you know, in regular theaters.
“I always wanted to work with a company of actors,” Smith has said. “But the thing is, that takes money.” Money is no longer a problem. With the success of her recent shows, corporate America has fallen at her feet, joining the already-seduced nonprofit sector. The list of sponsors for House Arrest reads like a cross between the New York Stock Exchange and The Foundation Directory. The production at Arena Stage has been made possible by generous grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Philip Morris, the Cummings Foundation, Fannie Mae, the Siemens Corporation, AT&T, the Cafritz Foundation — and many others, including you, in your capacity as taxpayer, through the National Endowment for the Arts. As if that weren’t enough, a group of “dedicated individuals,” co-chaired by Washington socialites Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, even formed The Friends of Anna Deavere Smith to push the production’s budget over the $ 2 million mark. Whatever its failings as theater, House Arrest is a triumph of grantsmanship.
A skeptic might see in this establishmentarian largesse a resurgence of the 1970s phenomenon of radical chic. In 1997, however, radicalism isn’t chic. Smith is obsessed with race — confronting the “tough issues” so beloved of the nonprofit sector and corporate philanthropists — even as she carefully avoids being “judgmental,” which would scare off the checkwriters, not to mention the drama critic at Newsweek. So she presents rioters and cops, crack addicts and bystanders as equally sympathetic.
Of course, her evenhandedness is itself a kind of editorializing. In her book version of Twilight, for example, she notes that, “depending on your point of view,” the riot in Los Angeles could be called a “riot,” an ” uprising,” or a “rebellion.” It sure looked like a riot on TV. But she prefers the term “events.” Riot, rebellion — who’s to know? This pseudo- agnosticism suits perfectly the sensibilities of skittish rich people in the late 1990s, who ache to be socially relevant but don’t want some performance artist giving the help any crazy ideas.
In Washington, with a larger budget than any heretofore available to her, Smith hired a small army of researchers, historians, personal assistants, and tape transcribers to assist in her work, along with the more conventional actors and technicians. House Arrest has become a small industry, operating out of the Arena Stage and a two-bedroom apartment across the street. She wrote much of the play herself, as playwrights do, but she has also interspersed many of her trademark interviews with the fictional material. In all she has taped more than three hundred and fifty subjects for the new work. Under her coaching, her actors impersonate a Who’s Who of federal Washington: the spheroid New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple, Labor secretary Alexis Herman, the first lady’s former chief of staff Maggie Williams, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Mike McCurry, Sam Donaldson, Dee Dee Myers . . . and, for balance, Peggy Noonan, a Republican.
Everyone has gone to a great deal of trouble. And after the play closes in Washington on January 4, they will go to a great deal more, as the House Arrest industry decamps to theaters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle. For the play is a work in progress. “I decided for this project I wanted to have a different relationship to the theater,” Smith has said. “I wanted one which would not just be about me and the audience. I wanted to look at what was behind the scenes in the theater and to have a nontraditional relationship with aspects of it.”
Whatever that may mean, she is apparently still looking. Smith has been writing House Arrest for two years, and as you watch the play you can’t help but wonder what she’s been doing with all her time. The show runs for three hours, as compared with two hours for Twilight and ninety minutes for Fires. She gets windier as she grows in public esteem. Something similar happened to Cronkite.
There’s little point in dwelling for long on the play itself. House Arrest opens with a monologue — again, taped and transcribed and performed verbatim — from a tour guide at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. “If this project is a legitimate search for American character,” Smith has said, “then somewhere in my journey I had to come to the so-called ‘center.’ I had to come to Washington and I had to learn something about the presidency.” What she has learned about the presidency is that Jefferson did it with Sally Hemings; the theme recurs like a tape loop. When the guide stops talking, we see Sally on the sales block, baring her teeth and flexing her arms for prospective buyers, and then we see Sally about to be bedded by randy Tom, and then, from nowhere, out pops a woman — a skinny woman! — impersonating R. W. Apple as he sips Chablis and chuckles pompously. And so it continues, scene by scene. House Arrest is hard to follow.
There is a play within the play; this is the part Smith has conjured from her imagination, and it turns out that as a playwright she has a taste for melodrama. She reaches frequently for aphorism and invariably fails. Several of her fictional characters attend a party at the Jockey Club, a favorite watering hole of the political class. “I bet the only f–g that goes on around here is star-f–g,” says one actor. “There’s no music here,” observes another pensively. “Just the smell of achievement.”
The made-up plot involves a theatrical troupe searching for grant money (” Write about what you know,” say the drama textbooks). It is forced to hire three prisoners on work release to qualify for a grant, and when the actors venture to Washington, trouble ensues. But by the play’s bittersweet close, all the loose ends are neatly resolved, leaving only the questions of what, precisely, House Arrest is supposed to be about, and why, more to the point, the vast institutional resources of American do-goodery have been mobilized to support a woman of such modest gifts.
Those questions are impolite in any case. In the arts today — to quote the nightly send-off of an earlier sage — that’s the way it is.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Grantsmanship vs.
