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February 1, 2008
Resilience and vulnerability
You only have three more days to catch Anna Deavere Smith’s new play, “Let Me Down Easy,” during its world premiere engagement at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. I saw it last night and was frankly surprised that there were lots of empty seats in the small theater — this is a national event in our own backyard and in an earlier, more vibrant era for theatre, the run would have sold out before it opened Jan. 9.
Smith has become well known for her acting appearances on TV series such as “The West Wing” and in movies (“Philadelphia,” “The Human Stain”) over the past decade, but this is her first solo stage show in more than 10 years.
Longtime Long Wharf fans still remember Smith’s career-making 1992 show “Fires in the Mirror” in which she embodied characters on both sides of the terrible religious/racial division in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein writes in the “LMDE” program, “Never before or since have I witnessed a piece of theatre that so captured the temperature of a city and reflected its zeitgeist.”
Smith followed that piece with “Twilight: Los Angeles” — about the Los Angeles riots — which played Broadway and was later taped for PBS airing.
“LMDE” is the most sprawling of Smith’s theatre pieces, an examination of what the writer-actress calls “the resilience and vulnerability of the human body.”
Smith has spent years interviewing athletes, doctors, models, and media celebrities about health, body image, illness, death, and grief. The artist culled hundreds of hours of interviews into a lucid script and for two-and-half hours, she becomes well known people like Lance Armstrong and Ann Richards, little known doctors and medical researchers, and ordinary people coping with their bodies in good times and bad. In the most harrowing section, she becomes the late ABC film critic Joel Siegel raging against his terminal cancer and network bosses who still expect him to cover the summer movie season.
The show takes us to Rwanda, New Orleans, Yale-New Haven Hospital and sleek lofts in SoHo.
Smith doesn’t mimic her interview subjects, but she transforms herself from scene to scene with costuming and vocal inflections that convince us we have listened to more than two dozen different people — male and female, young and old.
It’s an incredible piece of performance art grounded on real people grappling with primal issues.
The show could, perhaps, use some minor cutting and shaping before it is produced in New York, but it is not to be missed.
(For ticket information on the four remaining performances of “Let Me Down Easy” visit longwharf.org.)
Posted by Joe on February 1, 2008 5:43 PM
