TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today, actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, has played a national security adviser on "The West Wing," a matriarch on "Black-Ish" and a magazine editor on "Inventing Anna." But for more than 50 years, the work she keeps returning to is America itself. Smith pioneered what we now call documentary or verbatim theater. She interviews people, sometimes hundreds of them, caught inside a national fracture, like a riot or epidemic. And then she stands alone on a stage and performs their exact words.
In her 1992 play "Fires In The Mirror," she became Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the aftermath of a deadly racial conflict. In "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," she became the city in the days after the Rodney King verdict. And in her 2016 play "Notes From The Field," she examined the school-to-prison pipeline. Here she is as Leticia de Santiago, a parent from Stockton, California, on the lengths she takes to keep her kids out of trouble.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "NOTES FROM THE FIELD")
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: (As Leticia de Santiago) And I think I was a very strict mother. Anything involving my kids, I was very involved. I used to even go at nighttime and smell them. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, to see if they were not drinking or smoking. Oh, yes, I did so many things to keep my kids out of trouble, and thanks to the Lord, I think I did a good job.
MOSLEY: Anna Deavere Smith's new play turns that lens on her own family. "Basil Biggs" premieres this month in Philadelphia, written for the nation's 250th anniversary. The title character is her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who became a prominent Gettysburg figure and the conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping to lead enslaved people to freedom. Smith first learned about him a decade ago while appearing on PBS's "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates Jr. In this clip, Gates explains the remarkable role Biggs played in the war's aftermath.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FINDING YOUR ROOTS")
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR: Now, this obituary, Anna, is for Celia Biggs Penn, Basil's daughter, who died in 1936. And it gives us a sense of what your ancestors did in the fateful days right before the battle.
SMITH: Mrs. Penn, last of kin who fled '63 battle, dies. The only colored persons in this section, the Biggs family, was warned to leave this section with the approach of the Confederate troops.
GATES: OK. So...
SMITH: Wow.
GATES: ...Your ancestors fled...
SMITH: Unbelievable.
GATES: ...The Confederate invasion. Now, remember, it's three days of combat, right?
SMITH: Right.
GATES: And Basil's farm was converted into a field hospital by the Confederates.
SMITH: My God, that's a story right there. That's an amazing - that's a play.
MOSLEY: Anna Deavere Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
SMITH: Thank you for having me.
MOSLEY: That moment that we just heard, I think the audience, if they watch it, I think we all came to the same conclusion at the same time, including you, that it is a play. And now it is exactly a play. Take us to that moment.
SMITH: Sure. Well, so (laughter) that was me with my friend, Skip, aka Henry Louis Gates Jr. And it was a very powerful moment, I have to say. But maybe what's equally as interesting is that I did nothing about it. That was in 2014. When it aired on PBS, my family raced off to Gettysburg - and that would be my generation of cousins and sisters - rushed off. And for some reason, I couldn't go.
I mean, you know, I am an artist. I'm nomadic. I go from pillar to post. And the only thing that was in the way? Other gigs. That's what was in the way. And then Kathy Sachs, who is an extraordinary philanthropist and arts collector, has been putting together a remarkable festival of arts here in Philadelphia, which is where I am right now, called What Now. And she asked me to write something for it. And because it was for the 250th anniversary, and because it was in Pennsylvania, I thought, oh, this is the time for me to write about Basil Biggs.
MOSLEY: What's a detail about Basil's life that completely surprised you? I mean, the entire story is pretty remarkable. But what was something that really stuck with you for years after?
SMITH: Well, I would say a sort of very pertinent and revolutionary discovery was that he could not read and write. And neither could my great-great-grandmother, Mary Jackson Biggs, which meant that I had nothing to go on in his words, no diaries, no letters. Now, that wouldn't seem unusual for Black people at that time. But the way I've worked for 50 years is to study every single, not just word, but utterance that a person makes in order to put together an American story.
So I had no document, nothing documentary to go on. I had photographs. That was it. And, of course, you know, the Civil War, it's been written about extensively, as has the Battle of Gettysburg. So I could sort of put together the facts of the era. But I have not - I don't have a word out of the mouth of my great-great-grandfather or his children. So this called for me to leave my documentary form. It allows me to still be the Americanist that I believe I am. But I had to do a different kind of writing, a different kind of inquiry.
MOSLEY: Yeah. How did you bring him to life?
SMITH: I was really terrified, honestly, you know, staring at the blank page. I had a fabulous time in Gettysburg, you know, made great friends there, felt absolutely at home in Gettysburg, spent a lot of time in the archives. But I still didn't know how to put the words on paper. And what - the best thing that happened was that I had been able to visit the farm, his first farm in Gettysburg. The farm is still there. The house is still there. The barn is still there. The creek is still there. And we believe that that's where he did a lot of his Underground Railroad activity.
This is the house that was taken over by the Confederates and turned into the Confederate hospital. There is still blood on the floor. Walking around the barn, walking around the farm really gave me the rooting that I needed to start writing. I don't know what I would've done if I hadn't had the chance to walk around that farm. And so it's also interesting that, especially for a Black man of that era, all three of the houses that he lived in in Gettysburg are still standing.
MOSLEY: He is the reason Lincoln had ground to stand on in that fateful November. He reburied the Union dead - right? - so that the cemetery could be dedicated, so that the Gettysburg address could be delivered.
SMITH: That's right. And the Underground Railroad also, obviously, is a story that one has to put together shreds for. It's underground, right? But the reason that he's commemorated now, the reason he's honored now in Gettysburg - what happened was that when word got out that the Confederates were coming to Gettysburg, you know, now we think about these things and, of course, you go to the battlefield. But, you know, it was a farm town, right? And when word was out that the Confederates were coming, Black people had every reason to believe that they were going to be snatched and taken back to the South, whether they were free or not. This had happened. A massive invasion and raid had happened nearby in Chambersburg.
So my great-great-grandfather took his family, my great-great-grandmother and the children, away. When they came back, really just a few days later, the farm had been taken over by the Confederates. They had claimed the house as their hospital. And I believe that my - that Basil Biggs had lost everything. I mean, he couldn't read and write. But he was very entrepreneurial.
He had a robust farm. He had a good business as a veterinarian. And I think that he took the grisly job of disinterring the Union dead and reburying them and cleaning up the 7,000 dead bodies with a group of other Black men that he brought together, I believe that he did that because he was broke. Now, it could be that, you know, he had a huge civic responsibility. I'm not sure. But they started that in October, and they had it in good enough shape that by November, when Lincoln came to consecrate what becomes the National Soldiers' Cemetery (ph), it was possible to do. The irony is that at least then, Black Union soldiers were not buried in that cemetery. And so Basil Biggs was a part of an organization called The Sons of Goodwill, who created a separate cemetery at that time for the Black Union dead.
MOSLEY: Did you ever consider playing Biggs yourself, like a one-woman show? Because this is a traditional play with a cast of actors.
SMITH: I'm very excited about these actors. And the whole part of casting the play was huge, you know, trying to find who would play these characters. And one actor walked in and looked exactly like my cousin, Basil Biggs, and like my brother. And there's a scene in the play that is just a real sort of contentious moment between Basil and this young man called Calvin. And I have to tell you, I just burst out crying in the auditions, sobbing, because it just reminded me of discord between my brother and my father.
And I made a very intentional decision in 1980, when many of us who were not white heterosexual-presenting males were encouraged, not just invited, but encouraged to write about ourselves. And I made the opposite move. And I said, I'm not going to write about myself, not going to write about my family. I'm going to chase America in terms of that which is not me. And I did that for 50 years. And so to have this kind of homecoming is very powerful in so many ways. And I think to see it outside of myself, rather than trying to embody it, is part of the power.
MOSLEY: Today, I'm talking with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith about her new play, "Basil Biggs." It's about her own great, great grandfather, a free Black man who reburied thousands of Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground where Lincoln delivered his famous address. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today I am talking with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Her new play, "Basil Biggs," traces the life of her great, great grandfather in the Civil War era Gettysburg. It premieres this month at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, written for the nation's 250th anniversary.
Smith was born in Baltimore in 1950 and came up through the theater as a classically trained actor. Somewhere along the way, she set down a different path. Instead of playing invented characters, she started turning a tape recorder on real Americans and performing their exact words, becoming a pioneer of what we now call documentary or verbatim theater.
Anna, I want to talk a little bit about verbatim theater because you came up, as I said, as an actor, and then you did this unusual thing. Instead of looking for roles, you started collecting people. What sparked that shift?
SMITH: You know, I think everything starts with a question. And I feel, for example, that education should be about us discovering our questions rather than seeking answers. And I had that extraordinary opportunity in a Shakespeare class when I first started studying acting. I didn't really begin that pursuit until I was 22 years old. And our Shakespeare teacher, on the first day - and I was very worried about Shakespeare class - and it's about speaking Shakespeare; it's not Shakespeare scholarship - made this particular suggestion that we expect the rhythm of Shakespeare to be like this, da da, da da, da da, da da, da da, what we call iambic pentameter. And she suggested in her argument that when we are trying to speak Shakespeare, we just speak the words as they are written, right? We don't add extra emotion or anything.
In making that argument, she said, but if there is an upside down rhythm in the second beat, this tells you that something is awry with the character. So that little other beats called a trochee. So if the rhythm goes, da da, dada, da da, da da, da da, that means there's something unsettled. And she gave the example of the end of the play King Lear, when Lear has lost everything. And he says, never, never, never, never, never. Everything's upside down.
So when I was in the conservatory, I was trying to figure out, how did that happen? How could emotions be captured in rhythms? And I decided that I would see if I could listen in real life to how people's rhythms changed, and if those changes would be indicative not only of disarray in a story that individual was telling me, but also in the world around them. And so this is one of those random things.
I was at a cocktail party and standing next to - like a wallflower, another woman was standing next to me. And she asked me what I did. What was my work? And I never, to this day, say I'm an actor. Like, even on a plane, if somebody says, what do you do? I never say I'm an actor because then you have that very embarrassing question, well what have I seen you in?
MOSLEY: Right. Yeah. What do you say?
SMITH: So I said, well, I'm trying to learn something about - imagine at a cocktail party - I'm trying to learn something about language and identity. And I said, and I'm trying to figure out how to get people to break their linguistic patterns when they speak. And she said, well, I'm a linguist. And she said, I'm going to give you three questions that will guarantee this can happen in the course of an hour. And the questions were, have you ever come close to death, have you ever been accused of something you didn't do and do you know the circumstances of your birth?
And so the first show that I made was with other actors. I only played one part, and I literally walked up to people on the streets of New York or wherever they were, and I said, I know an actor who looks like you. If you'll give me an hour of your time, I will invite you to see yourself perform. This was in 1980.
And so I talked to the lifeguard at the gym. I talked to the lady up the street, who had a secondhand clothes store. I talked to somebody who was in a fancy beauty parlor. And I made a show in which I would talk to somebody for an hour about whatever they want to talk about. Hair, you know, swimming lanes. And somewhere in that, I would ask those questions. And, lo and behold, their language took on these different patterns.
And so I trained myself how to listen by doing that. And then when you think about it, since I've gone to do plays about things that are upside down, are in disarray, are not iambic pentameter but are trochees, then it is the case that people speak in disrupted sentences. And they struggle to make sense, which means that they actually make these gorgeous, as far as I'm concerned, sort of architectures of language. And I'm very interested in those things, I will call them, those moments. And that's what I perform.
MOSLEY: I'm sure you've heard a lot of people say, oh, that takes a lot of bravery for you to just walk up to people on the street and just ask them questions. What were those early responses to you? Because you weren't talking to people on behalf of, say, a news organization or something tangible, specific, that people know that this would go toward.
SMITH: Well, I think, you know, it was kind of a curious thing - right? - for some girl to, you know, ask you that. Or I was doing a lot of temp work at the time. And the person I performed was Julia, who was at JCPenney. We worked in a basement. My desk was right next to hers. And I would hear Julia talking on the phone. And I thought, I've got to get an interview with Julia.
(LAUGHTER)
SMITH: So I know in advance, you know, of somebody who I thought was very, very interesting. And I think because nobody had ever asked them before. And by the way, this isn't like now, where people are going around taking selfies and pictures of each other. This is when my tape recorder was, you know, it was like this Panasonic thing that was probably almost a foot long.
MOSLEY: Yeah. Yeah.
SMITH: Right? So people weren't walking around with iPhones that they could record on. So I think it was, like, this odd thing this rather charming girl asking them to do (laughter). And they said yes.
MOSLEY: My own curiosity, what was so interesting about Julia on the phone at JCPenney in the basement?
SMITH: She was, well, see - she was just like - you know, she was one of those people who was - she was so - oh, she had a story about somebody who just had a meltdown on a bus going through the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. And she - as often what's so beautiful about Black people in particular, she acted out, like, all the people, right? So that was so great, you know? And, you know, I'll have to tell you another sort of epiphany I had about Julia.
So I said, I only played one part in that play. It was Julia. And she came. It was so exciting to see the people come to see themselves performed in this loft in New York. And Julia waited for me with her friends. And as we were walking down Leonard Street, her friend - Julia, girl, you were the star, girl, you were the star. And I thought, yeah, the character should be the star, not the actor, right? And so, I mean, she just was one of those Black women with a great sense of humor and a great ability to tell a story.
MOSLEY: Oh. See, this story - OK. I was wondering. You know, a lot of your performances remind me of an oral tradition I know some Black households have, like, the way people slide in and out of imitating others to kind of drive a point home. Did you see that growing up? What was the storytelling tradition in your house?
SMITH: Oh, yeah. I mean, Ms. Johnson next door, who weighed 400 pounds, couldn't move very far and would, you know, give me 25 cents to go down, buy her some fatback from the grocery store, Mr. Zelman's (ph) grocery store. And then, you know, I would sit on her porch and hear a story she had. And my maternal grandfather, who married Virginia Biggs, was a fantastic storyteller, so - as was my maternal grandmother. So I'd do anything for a story when I was little.
And you're right. There's that oral tradition. My Aunt Esther is the first person I ever interviewed, sitting in her kitchen. All my life, I listened to her. But the first actual interview I did knowing that I wanted to create this kind of theater, I tested it out on Aunt Esther.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUSSELL MALONE "THE BALLAD OF HANK CRAWFORD")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is the actor, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith. Over the last four decades, she invented and defined what's known as documentary or verbatim theatre. She's interviewed hundreds of people, then performed them on stage. "Fires In The Mirror," about the Crown Heights conflict, made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist. "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," about the city after the Rodney King verdict, earned her two Tony nominations. She went on to write "Let Me Down Easy," about the body and the American healthcare system and "Notes From The Field," about the school-to-prison pipeline. Her new play is called "Basil Biggs," and it's the story of her own great, great grandfather, a free Black man who played an important role in the Civil War battle of Gettysburg.
This thing that you do, this verbatim theatre, I have heard you describe it as you're borrowing people's stories with their permission. And there's something very specific about the people you choose. How do you decide who to interview?
SMITH: Well, who to interview is just who - you know, say - my play "Let Me Down Easy" was about healthcare, but it was also about the vulnerability of the human body to the state, to disease. And so I did extensive interviewing. I went to, for example, South Africa during the AIDS crisis when Mbeki was an AIDS denialist. I went to Rwanda 10 years after the genocide, sort of broken societies and talked to people. And I have an abstract idea of the problem that I'm trying to investigate. And I don't have a story. And then in the process of doing the interviews, and more importantly, in the process of being in the rehearsal room, I find a through line of a story.
MOSLEY: Where did the inspiration come for "Let Me Down Easy"?
SMITH: Dr. Ralph Horwitz was the head of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine. And he invited me in the late '90s to come to Yale Medical School and to interview doctors and patients and to perform at something called Medical Grand Rounds as a way of showing the doctors that they don't listen. And I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And at first, I thought it was 'cause I was just too intimidated to be around all those doctors. And he didn't give up. And when I finally went and started doing the interviews of patients, I realized the reason I was really worried was 'cause I knew it would have something to do with death.
And I did this performance at Medical Grand Rounds, and I performed doctors and some people who had been very, very sick. And after that performance, maybe a year later, he asked me to come back and do it in another situation, and I did. And those same patients, they were waiting eagerly backstage to say hello. And I thought, now, why would you want to come to see a show again that's dealing with a moment in your life where you almost died? And it dawned on me - because dying or not, something about the performance made it all real in a good way and solid in a good way 'Cause this was before the big healthcare conversation. But once the healthcare conversation - as we're starting to approach Obama and the whole conversation of healthcare starts to become real, then I realize I have a real sort of political place to put this excursion, really, around death into a frame. And that's what made me continue to work on it.
And also because, you know, people say, oh, how did you get this person to talk to you or how did you get this person to trust you? I say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm looking for the people who are screaming from a mountaintop and I just happen to be walking by. And when you go into a palliative care unit, you sit with somebody who's dying. If they have the strength, it's a scream from the mountaintop. They want to be heard. They want to communicate. And that's very dramatic and very stageworthy.
MOSLEY: In "Let Me Down Easy," there's a person that you embody, Brent Williams. He's a rodeo bull rider from Idaho. You talk about him quite a bit over the last 20 years. He was someone who really taught you what seems like a lot of lessons. But I want to play a little clip because he talked to you about the ways bull riding has wrecked his body, that - he has this one story that a bull shoved his face through metal chutes, for example. And in this clip of your performance as Williams, you're talking about his health care deductible.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SMITH: (As Brent Williams) Yeah, I got insurance. Blue Cross of Idaho, family policy, 260 bucks a month cover all of us. Then we got a $7,500 deductible, (laughter) which is stupid. I mean, you know, we don't ever meet that. I mean, all this paying money, then we got to pay 7,500 before they meet it. They're just trying to rape us, like all the people that got the money. They rape the poor till pretty soon - or they rape the middle class till the middle class becomes poor. Then they going to start raping the rich. And they're going to break the whole country, I think. But basically, I'm an optimist.
(LAUGHTER)
MOSLEY: That was my guest, Anna Deavere Smith, as Brent Williams in "Let Me Down Easy." And when you watch this, there is a lot of physicality to that performance. You're wearing a cowboy hat. Your legs are wide. You're strutting across the stage. And these are parts of the story as well, that body language. What is it telling us? What is it telling you that words don't convey?
SMITH: First of all, if my performance is attentive to detail, then you see the choreography. You don't know why you're drawn to that person. But if we were to sit down and break it down for you and show you the choreography, you'd know why. I mean, with Brent, he was kind of outrageous. You know, I actually invited Brent to New York a couple of times, and he's a very different person than the sort of artists that I hang out with, very, very conservative. But, you know, he's a perfect example of someone who's game, you know, who comes with goodwill. He knows. And I have - he was in my apartment, dancing cheek to cheek with the astute legal scholar Patricia Williams.
MOSLEY: (Laughter) What? Wow.
SMITH: And so it's about goodwill. You know, we talk about how do we get over these differences. It's like, he doesn't agree with anybody, in this case, sitting around the dinner and then dancing afterwards, when people had drank enough. You know, he agreed. Nobody agrees agreed with Brent. But he felt at home in my house, right?
MOSLEY: You like talking to people that you don't agree with.
SMITH: Well, not necessarily all the time. For the purpose of putting them in a play, yes. So, you know, we have to admit that that's also different, in a way, from real life, right? I can do things in my art that I may not be able to do in my life. So with Brent, I went to the national rodeo finals with him and standing around with all of his friends, you know, swigging Chivas and telling stories about women that weren't so great, right? Would I be doing that just for fun? Probably not.
MOSLEY: Today, I'm talking with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith about her new play "Basil Biggs." It's about her own great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who reburied thousands of Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground where Lincoln delivered his famous address. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAY CHARLES' "THE RAY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today, I am talking with actor and playwright, Anna Deavere Smith. Her new play, "Basil Biggs," traces the life of her great-great-grandfather in the Civil War era Gettysburg. It premieres this month at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, written for the nation's 250th anniversary. Smith's earlier plays include "Fires In The Mirror," Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" and her 2016 play "Notes From The Field."
I want to talk briefly about the choices you made in "Notes From The Field." You showcased a wide range of people - civil rights leaders and high school students and prisoners like Denise Dodson. She was an inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women, and she was serving time for murder. And I'm going to play a clip. Here she is talking about her children and the circumstances of her crime. You playing her. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "NOTES FROM THE FIELD")
SMITH: (As Denise Dodson) I had six children. Now I have five. One of them died since I've been here. The oldest being 34, the youngest being 21. I had my youngest child when I was in the Baltimore Detention Center. I've been here 23 years. Well, my boyfriend - my former boyfriend, 'cause we wasn't together at the time - shot and killed a guy who tried to rape me. Well, they didn't consider it accomplice. I got the same charges he did. First degree murder. I think it's fair. You talking about somebody's life. Whether it's in your control or not, somebody's life has been taken, so I do think it's fair. But I think that if I had had a better education, I would have been more upright, so to speak, you know, because without that education, I always felt less than. And I think if I had had that education, I would have known that I am somebody. I am a good person.
MOSLEY: That was my guest Anna Deavere Smith as inmate Denise Dodson. I can almost hear your questions and her answers, Anna, of course, like, the questions you asked to elicit those answers. But it's her demeanor. She was one of several Black women and girls at the heart of this - "Notes From The Field." What drew you to put people like her at the center of the story?
SMITH: Well, the story really was about looking at the pressures or what we call - what are the things that pull us away from giving people an education? And why, when they are unable to fit into maybe the sorting mechanism of education, do they end up incarcerated? And I heard a chilling statistic that there's something like in the 70% of Black and brown kids that can't really read at the level they need to read.
MOSLEY: Just across the board in the United States.
SMITH: Yeah. And so we have to ask deeply, deeply, what's in the way of that? And "Notes From The Field" was looking at education and the things that pull people away from school and the things that pull school away from people. And with Denise, you know, of course, sitting in a prison, I mean, she's aware of being under surveillance all the time. You know, she's probably about a year, maybe, from going before the review board again. She's very conscious of every single thing she's saying. And there was extraordinary humility in Denise and emotional power. And her job in prison was to train service dogs. And she talked about how dogs are more decent than people. And even that the amount of attention that she gives those dogs to train them, what if we gave the same type of attention to children?
And the last thing I'll say about this is even if you go back to Thomas Jefferson and you look at his plan in the notes from the State of Virginia - on the State of Virginia, his plan for education was to find the excellent ones and throw out the rubbish. The word rubbish is in that document. So - and that's just talking about white men. And so, our system has always been one of sorting. Let's sort out the people that we don't want to be bothered with.
MOSLEY: You ended up studying at the American Conservatory Theater. This theater community that you then became a part of. You know, the way we think about theater today is always talking about it in terms of keeping it alive. And this sounds like this was a vibrant place for you.
SMITH: First of all...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SMITH: My first job (laughter) was for a Black theater company that had been started by Ed Bullins, great Black playwright. And it was called The Grass Roots Theatre Company (ph). And I went in there to see if there was something I could do, and they said, well, you could be the stage manager. I said, well, I don't know how to do that. Oh, you'll be fine. You look like you could be good.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
SMITH: I was their so-called stage manager. And I had a crisis when I decided to go to school at the American Conservatory Theater, which would be like the white people's theater, you know, in the middle of town that was very, you know, resourced, and not to work anymore at the Grass Roots Theatre Company. But the American Conservatory Theater had a company of 52 actors, and that's where I was trained. So that was entirely different type of time than now.
And, you know, we always say the theater is dying, but I think it's that it has another economic model now. Those were the days when the idea was to have a theater in your town that was the sort of gem, the cultural gem of a town, like a symphony. And that changed when those theaters started to see themselves as breeding places for Broadway. And so I would say it's not that the theater is dead. It's that it had a different economic model. And we never know when that may change again.
MOSLEY: I mean, you're deep in the Basil Biggs story right now. But is there an American story you have your sights on for the future that's been swirling in your head, that you're dying to explore?
SMITH: No. Because I think that Basil Biggs' story about approaching the Civil War, about being a part of restoring his town after this massive, massive catastrophe and following through to touch the American promise and going through the 15th Amendment, which - the play takes us through that. I think there are many things about that that are still unfinished business in our country right now. And so I'm pleased to be able to see what lessons I can learn, the actors can learn and the audience can learn by looking at that moment in history and looking at this particular family and how they came through it.
MOSLEY: Anna Deavere Smith, thank you so much for this conversation and your time. This has been a real pleasure.
SMITH: My pleasure. Thank you so much to you and your producers.
MOSLEY: Actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Her new play, "Basil Biggs," debuts at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia this weekend. Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews Larry David's new HBO series. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARY LOU WILLIAMS' "IT AIN'T NECESSARILY SO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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