Notes from the Field

Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope. -The Village Voice

Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation (Variety).

Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated. )

Using people’s own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time-and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.