Anna Deveare Smith Educates, Amuses Cambridge Crowd

Using her acting and impersonation talents to perform snapshots of the American character, Anna Deveare Smith educated and amused audience members last night in the Askwith Lecture Hall at Radcliffe College.

More than 700 people, many of whom had to sit on the floor, came to hear her speak and watch her act. The speech was also simulcast by video to the Gutman Conference Center.

Smith, a former Stanford professor of arts and former Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, is a renowned playwright and actress. Her plays--Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992--are unique one-performer shows in which she herself takes on the identities of numerous characters.

Smith was raised in Baltimore. In the 70s, her parents sent her to college so that she could "find goals." Instead, she told the audience, she came home with "lots of questions, wild hair and no goals."

Smith said her search for an "integrated, multifaceted" American identity began in an acting class she took "as a fluke" in her 20s. When the professor required all the students to repeat 14 lines over and over, she chose Shakespeare's Queen Margaret, and had what she termed to be "a transcendental experience."

Smith said she believes the ability to take on and understand someone else through that person's words is an extremely powerful tool.

She said she founded her work in the attempt to make words say more than they seem to.

Smith likened putting herself into someone else's words to putting on their shoes because both experiences help build bridges that will "help us communicate further."

She challenged the roots of language, denying the imperative for traditional sentence structure.

"Humanness is often stored in unfinished sentences, with no beginning, middle or end," she said.

Smith concluded her speech with a performance of snapshots of George C. Wolf, Professor of Afro-American studies Cornel R. West '74 and others.

She will participate in the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue sponsored by the American Repertory Theatre and the DeBois Institute this coming July. The goal of the Institute is to demonstrate the power of art to educate and effect change.

"She has an extraordinary and unique talent and phenomenal insight into the human condition," said Florence Ladd, an author and former head of the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Ladd said she believes the Harvard community is lucky that Smith chose to share her talent in Cambridge.

"That she has brought this to the stage, in our time, is a wonderful opportunity for all of us to expand our understanding of what society is about," Ladd said.

Barbara Grossman, a past Bunting Fellow, drama professor at Tufts and a member of the National Council on the Arts, said she was "struck by [Smith's] willingness to use herself, her body and her passion, as the bridge to touch us, to move us and to galvanize us into action."

Smith's speech was part of a series of biweekly lectures sponsored by the Harvard Education Forum at the Harvard Graduate School for Education.