Anna Deavere Smith's new play in New York

Anna Deavere Smith's latest show Let Me Down Easy is now playing at Second Stage Theatre in New York. Below is a brief excerpt from an in-depth article published September 30 in the New York Times about Ms. Smith and her work, including Fires in the Mirror which 16th Street produced earlier this year:

A theater critic once wrote that Smith doesn’t impersonate characters so much as she does impressions of their souls. As lovely as that sounds, it’s not what she’s striving for. Her project, since the ’70s, she told me, has been about trying to understand “the relationship of language to character.” She explained: “By that I mean the rhythms, the sounds people choose to make while they’re speaking.” Pursue those, she argues, and you’ll get somewhere interesting, even if it’s not precisely inside their heads or inside the part of you that can relate emotionally to what’s inside their heads. Read the entire article by Susan Dominus here.

Thanks, Kathleen, for passing this article on. Enjoy!