At Loeb, Smith Hunts for Grace

Anna Deavere Smith walked onto the Loeb Mainstage, sat down on a wooden bench, and stated, “We’re going to go hunting for grace.” “Let Me Down Easy,” which was conceived, written, and performed by Smith and will run at the American Repertory Theatre through Saturday, is indeed a hunt: we travel from her Maryland hometown to Harvard to Rwanda to New Orleans, searching for affirmation that humans really aren’t that bad and finding at the end that the stories that persist with us are those that weigh down the heart. Despite Smith’s best efforts, “Let Me Down Easy” serves as a reminder that, although grace exists, it remains hidden and hard to find.

Smith opened the performance with a Christian definition of grace delivered by a fiery grandmother who explains that grace is an intervention of God in the hardest times. Continuing with a religious investigation into the meaning of the word, Smith re-enacted interviews she conducted with Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Harvard professor and preacher, and Reverend James Cone. She pulled ties out of her pocket, donned glasses, reclined on a chair, and assumed an affected tone of academic authority before switching to a more spirited, Southern accent. Smith’s ability to vary her voice wavered at times, but her subtle costume changes and obvious mannerism shifts made it clear when she had transitioned into another person.

She wove together almost 20 narratives using a few simple props and voice changes in an elegant feat of resourcefulness. Her stagehand, a young woman concealed in black, frequently slipped onto the stage to add a table or a sash. While acting as the former governor of Texas, the late Ann Richards, Smith thanked the help when she put dinner on the table, integrating the stage hand in the performance to indicate Richards’ possession of servants. In a lighter moment, Smith, as English and aesthetics professor Elaine Scarry, plucked a piece of sage from grass surrounding the stage and handed it to an audience member to roll between her fingers and smell, asking, “Good, right?”

At times, Smith assumed the position of the interviewer in order to create different kinds of portraits, and at other times her presence as an actor became especially conspicuous, as when she impersonated Henriette Mutigwarba, a Rwandan genocide survivor. Smith as Mutigwarba recounted how her mother begged militiamen, with arms outstretched, to spare to her son’s life—only to have her arms cut off so she could no longer beg. As she told her character’s story, Smith bent over in her chair and raised her left hand to her face, letting her body tremble in pain. But, when a photograph of the real Henriette Mutigwarba appeared on a screen, it suddenly became clear that Anna Deveare Smith was an impersonator. The all-consuming pain that Mutigwarba must have felt was only imitated onstage; she was the only one who could truly experience her emotion.

Smith thus revealed her position as a medium through which these people’s stories could be told, stories that filled and carried the one-woman show. Without the testimonies of real-life Africans, Americans, preachers, and health care administrators, “Let Me Down Easy” would have simply been a play—a troubling but forgettable Friday evening diversion. Instead, it provided a striking reminder of the resilience and vulnerability of the human spirit. The story of jockey Gabriel Saez, who led Eight Belles across the finish line before the grey thoroughbred collapsed and broke her two front ankles, acted as a metaphor for the play. It was a moment of simultaneous triumph and tragedy—and, as with the play, it was the tragedy that resonated.

—Staff writer Ama R. Francis can be reached at afrancis@fas.harvard.edu