America’s “Most Exciting” Playwright Takes on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

You know her on-screen as Gloria Akalitus in Nurse Jackie, or as Nancy McNally in The West Wing, but these days, Anna Deavere Smith is onstage, solo. As part of an ongoing project she calls On the Road: A Search for American Character, Smith has written and performed at least 18 one-woman plays exploring social issues around the country. Topics have included women tangling with the judicial system, the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and the uproar in Crown Heights following a 1991 car accident involving a Hasidic driver and two seven-year-old Caribbean American kids. Smith has been called "the most exciting individual in American theater right now." A MacArthur "genius" fellow and a National Humanities Medal holder, she was recently selected to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

For her latest play, Notes From the Field, Smith interviewed some 170 people—from California to her hometown, Baltimore—to inhabit characters based on individuals caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. She's taken the performance from coast to coast, and will grace Baltimore's Center Stage on December 4 and 5. In the play's second act, which Smith calls an "interruption," she invites audience members to brainstorm potential solutions to the issues the characters raised. Smith sees theater as a unique way into social problems: "We're in the presence of one another. It's not like we can start texting or doing our taxes," she says. A live performance "manages to get undivided attention. In all the varieties of media, that doesn't happen so often."

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