Surely no one mines the country’s flashpoints — and outright explosions — more artfully than Anna Deavere Smith.
So I looked forward to her talk last Friday at the Marin Center. The actress offered up ³Glimpses of America in Change,” featuring vignettes that illustrated black-Jewish tensions among other contemporary plums. Not a full evening of theater, the sketches, from two of her previous one-woman shows and some unaired interviews, were powerful if somewhat disjointed.
Deavere Smith won a MacArthur Foundation ³genius” award for pioneering a new form of theater. Choosing such topics as the Rodney King riots in L.A. or the fiery tensions between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, she interviews those involved and retells their stories verbatim in theater pieces sculpted from intensely involved characters.
But her choice of two pieces from her Crown Heights repertoire to give voice to Jewish-black relations made for a disquieting juxtaposition: an anonymous Lubavitcher woman and a Farrakhan follower.
I expected to have my complacency rattled. That’s her job. And she’s damn good at it. Instead, I simply felt I had been accidentally kicked. Hurt. And to what end? That’s TV’s job.
The Lubavitcher vignette served as ³a perfect metaphor for our interdependence,” Deavere Smith tells the audience before jumping into character. But as she took to the airwaves in a decidedly unsophisticated, high-pitched whine, I shrank into my seat.
“This would be a lot funnier to me if this were a Jewish audience,” I said to my companion.
The Lubavitcher woman, through Deavere Smith, offers up a rollicking tale: Her baby had fiddled with the knobs on the radio, resulting in a sudden blast of deafeningly loud, static-ridden polka music. Because it was Shabbat, the adults could not turn off the radio and had to find a non-Jewish neighbor to help ‹ in this case, a 9-year-old African-American boy.
“I said, ‘I need help,’ and motioned for him to come in.” He gets the picture when he hears the unbearable noise and sees the family members cringing.
“So he says, ‘See that thing that says ‘On’ and ‘Off’? You just press that.’ I could imagine him thinking, ‘Wow, and they say Jews are so smart.'”
Ultimately, the woman’s own innocence and sweetness takes over. And Deavere Smith is a master storyteller.
With the audience members still wiping their eyes, Deavere Smith cut a sharp, 180-degree turn.
In “The Seven Verses of Conrad Muhammed,” a Black Muslim college student says a passage in Deuteronomy reveals blacks, not Jews, are the real “chosen people.”
Slavery is the most abominable crime in human history, he says, because of its extended tenure, killing, maiming and subjugating millions over a 200-year period. But the speech, delivered in dignified, measured tones, continues at length: Jews have raped, violated, stolen the identity of blacks, usurping their rightful place in the Holy Land and religious history.
Deavere Smith concludes by saying, “So it’s not so simple after all.”
And so? This was the only of her pieces that did not include a third voice. There was no action, no interaction, only rhetoric. After the Lubavitcher vignette, one expected a second piece on black-Jewish relations to somehow complete a picture, or at least offer its counterpart. Deeply disturbing, this piece offered neither.
But the monologue did more than shock and offend. It cast the first vignette in a different light. First self-effacing, the Lubavitcher woman now appeared ridiculous, oblivious to the anguish of others. The point ‹ at best, that we are worlds apart ‹ was hardly obvious.
If, as the brilliant Deavere Smith says, “Acting is portraying a role in order to reveal a truth,” perhaps something was missing here: a third vignette that would frame an obvious question, that would strike at a chord of empathy that resounds, one would hope, within all of us. Deavere Smith said it best in the question-and-answer period: “There’s so little we have to use as a tool for empathy.” To that I would add, and we need every tool we can get.
Between vignettes, Deavere Smith related how she came to California and chose theater as her raison d’être, studying at the American Conservatory Theater. She had been enraptured, she said, by the symphony of tongues that greeted her ear in the culturally and ethnically diverse state.
She also offered ruminations on the state of American culture. The term “politically correct” came in for brickbats: “Some question where this term originated from now, just when the language was becoming more inclusive.”
This much is true: Jews are hypersensitive about how we are perceived ‹ or how we imagine we are perceived. But it is also true that too often, Jews don’t factor into that rich culture of ethnic diversity that progressives rhapsodize over in describing this region. We’re still the outsider.
Like Deavere Smith, I, too, am a “I’m a prisoner of hope.” One of the most hopeful facets of her approach is the dialogue she so deliberately triggers. Here’s hoping the discussion, an exciting collage of real voices, will include us.