San Diego Magazine / May 2011 / Anna Deavere Smith

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Anna Deavere Smith

The acclaimed playwright and performer brings her one-woman play to San Diego

With a long list of recognitions, one thing’s for sure: Anna Deavere Smith doesn’t do fluff. She is a Pulitzer Prize and two-time Tony nominee (for play-writing and acting) and a veteran of the big screen. Smith has acted in movies like Philadelphia, The American President and Rachel Getting Married. You might also recognize her from television (The West Wing, The Practice). She received an NAACP Image Award for her current role on Nurse Jackie. This month, she portrays 20 different real people in a single play called Let Me Down Easy. Here is the real Anna Deavere Smith.

What is Let Me Down Easy about? It’s about the fact that your body is vulnerable but your spirit is resilient. I see the play as telling the human side of the debate we’re having in the country right now about health­-care. I’m bringing real stories from real people. I would like the audience to consider these stories as they think about what they want to have happen in the United States.

You interviewed 300 people on three continents. Anyone we know? One of the people I play, Lance Armstrong, talks about toughness — not in terms of physical stuff, but how tough it is to be present for your family, how to be there for the people you love. One reason there are athletes in this show is that they push themselves beyond what they feel is possible. A sportswriter talks about how athletes want to be exhausted, they want to use up everything they have. It’s not a good day if you don’t come home all banged up and sore. That same kind of spirit for winning or pushing your limits can be applied when you’re going thru something that is tough, like an illness, or if you want to help somebody else who’s going through that.

You play all 20 characters in a one-woman show — no pressure, eh? There’s a certain way I have to live in order to deliver and to maintain that level of concentration. I stop having serious conversations at about 3 in the afternoon. I can’t afford to have anything happen, large or small, that is disruptive to the amount of concentration I need on the stage, not just to say all the lines I have to say but to represent each person... So I shut everything down, and I go into a very focused time of getting ready to go on stage. I arrive at the theater no later than 6 o’clock for an 8 o’clock show.

Do you have the same routine for your work on Nurse Jackie? In television, I am unable to have that type of locked-down life because there are a lot of other people around. Somebody might come and rewrite the scene right before I do it, and I might have made choices that become absolutely irrelevant. I might arrive at 5 in the morning and they might not get to my scene until midnight of that day. It wears my emotional energy to do that, so I admire actors who are more experienced in that form and the way they maintain mental management in the middle of a three-ring circus.

Since this is our health issue: How do you stay in top form for your show? I have a macrobiotic diet when I’m performing; staying healthy and working out is very important. I’ve learned that kale is magic. I think we could live off kale. I have to find things to eat that are easy to digest but give me a lot of energy. Rest is really important. I can’t go out. I can’t go to loud places because I can’t talk in them. I have to be careful about how much I talk.

Well, thanks for talking to us! What do you know about San Diego? When I had just finished college, three of my crazy friends and I got in a car, and we took off across country. None of us had any idea what we were going to do with our lives, and the place we landed was San Diego. One of my friends was in Coronado; her husband was a naval officer. He was in Vietnam, and we all lived with her for a couple of months. I’d never been anywhere like Coronado. It seemed like it was all about tennis and kids on bikes, and everybody was blonde. I worked in a factory putting really cheap pottery in boxes, so I’m glad to be coming back to San Diego with a strong sense of purpose and to be a different human being than I was then.

Catch Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy at San Diego Rep’s Lyceum Stage April 27 – May 15 (79 Horton Plaza, sdrep.org) and on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie through May.