Anna Deavere Smith

We saw an excellent Anna Deavere Smith play tonight. My friend Jane who was someone I wished I had hung out with more when we were in highschool now lives in Boston and is a grad student teaching speech or speech for actors or something (I honestly don't understand how you can spend all day for two years teaching actors how to enunciate) had two extra tickets to this one woman show, which is apparently all ADS does, at the ART so we went after work.

It's a one woman show where she switches back and forth between different characters talking about grace, in terms of the soul and the body. All the text is taken from interviews that she gives. So basically, she asks questions of academics and religious figures and real people who've gone through disease, genocide in Rwanda, and being abandoned by their government and country during Katrina, and so on, and then she acts out their responses to her questions, so she sort of weaves a polyphony (wow! Did I just mix that metaphor, THAT much?!)... composes a polyphony of different voices (mostly she brings this out through the voice, less so through body language) each touching on different aspects of the same subject.

To me, my concept of grace is much informed by Heinrich von Kleist's essay In the Puppet Theatre. To me, grace is the zone where the human approaches the unhuman, the beyond human. Where action or thought or performance loses self-consciousness and therefore performs at a level of effortlessness where human error is erased, where it ceases to feel like a real, live, person doing something and starts to seem like an android, an automaton mimicking a human, but inhumanly perfect.

The play (that's not quite the right word, is it? It was more like a performance art/lecture) was extremely moving, but somewhat unfocused. She didn't at all make it clear (at least not to me) where the connection between bodily grace and vulnerability and spiritual grace is. It's not an essay, an academic attempt to make an argument about a subject and then examine the whys and hows of how she came to that conclusion, and it's not a fictional piece with a narrative (why do people always say 'narrative' when they mean 'story'? Why does the 'n-word' [heh] sound so much more powerful?) that examines an idea from multiple facets, so what is it? What is i trying to say? Why did it have to be made? It's a total cop-out to say, to foster dialogue, to make people talk about such and such. Because it's an elite art piece performed exclusively for ultra WASP Harvard professors in the poshest neighborhood of the poshest city in an elite, ultra liberal state. The point is clearly not to encourage elite liberal white people to voyeuristically glimpse into the lives of poor people.