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Probing the pipeline with Anna Deavere Smith

If political theater or theatricalized politics needed an intuitive practitioner at its forefront, it would be Anna Deavere Smith. Known to television viewers as a concerned, authoritative face on Showtime's Nurse Jackie and, once upon a time, ABC's The W

Anna Deavere Smith's "The Pipeline Project," a work in progress born out of a two-year residency at Philadelphia Theatre Company, sheds light on the school-to-prison pipeline, which shuttles young African Americans from poverty to the prison system.
Anna Deavere Smith's "The Pipeline Project," a work in progress born out of a two-year residency at Philadelphia Theatre Company, sheds light on the school-to-prison pipeline, which shuttles young African Americans from poverty to the prison system.Read more

If political theater or theatricalized politics needed an intuitive practitioner at its forefront, it would be Anna Deavere Smith. Known to television viewers as a concerned, authoritative face on Showtime's Nurse Jackie and, once upon a time, ABC's The West Wing, the actress/playwright/director has long been crafting her own quilt of singularly American stories and characters, the latest piece of which - The Pipeline Project, a work in progress about the "school-to-prison pipeline" - brings her this week to Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education centennial celebration, Smith will perform excerpts from Pipeline at a free, public event at the Penn Museum, and on May 11 will appear at the Suzanne Roberts Theater for Philadelphia Theatre Company's Master Series, discussing transformation and creative growth.

"Your audiences have always been so warm and receptive to me, and I love the Philadelphia Theatre Company," Smith says.

Well she might. She is in a two-year residency through PTC - funded by a $100,000 grant from the James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight Arts Challenge - to work on The Pipeline Project, about how young African American males are shuttled from classrooms into the criminal justice system, and she appeared at PTC in 2011 with Let Me Down Easy, for which she won a Barrymore Award for best actress.

"I have an even longer relationship with your area," says Smith, mentioning acting studies at Glenside's Beaver College (now Arcadia University), from which she graduated in 1971, as well as spending time here with her aunt, Philadelphia journalist Virginia Clark.

"In my youth, Philly seemed just a little classier than Baltimore, where I was born," she says, breathing a heavy sigh at that city's current racial turmoil.

Struggle. Unrest. Authority. Race. Inequity. These are things that have forever fueled Smith's brand of documentary theater, with its one-woman, multiple-character, many-viewpoints presentations - journalistic, educational, socially and politically motivated - under the rubric of On the Road: The Search for American Character.

"It's a long process for me, doing this sort of theater, that goes back to the study of Shakespeare, where you're encouraged to speak the words and find the character or identity written into language," she says. "My journey has been to absorb America word for word."

That journey has taken Smith's cinema verité-like blurring of theater and journalism to race riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles (Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles), the inner workings of the health care system (Let Me Down Easy), unique characters from writer Studs Turkel to convict Paulette Jenkins (On Grace), and the American presidency (House Arrest).

"My grandfather used to tell me, 'If you say the words long enough, they become you,' " she says, "so, I learn about America through repeating the words and using the theater." Her stories, her characters, and their plights are the results of talking it through and becoming.

It took her a while to understand, to become, the "kids having a rough time" who fill The Pipeline Project. She didn't really know or have contact with them. On the other hand, those in the educational system - the principals and teachers - she got, as she is herself a teacher, at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and the NYU School of Law.

"My interest in the school-to-prison pipeline idea begins with my interest in education, as someone who was raised by teachers and who teaches, for 40 years - a far more fortunate situation in that I teach people, mostly artists, whose intellectual health is intact. The kids of The Pipeline Project got shoved out of school and out of the system."

Smith's play looks at how society ostracizes black youth who are imprisoned because they've committed minor infractions, a consequence that can ultimately lead to the societal troubles that exist in Ferguson, Mo.; Staten Island, and Baltimore.

"Zero-tolerance policies that came about in the wake of Columbine are the same policies that have zapped this system now, push kids out of school for minor misdemeanors and into jails where they become part of the prison system," says Smith. "We lose the opportunities to bring those same kids back into the democracy. This is our moral dilemma."

Philadelphia plays a large part in The Pipeline Project. Though Smith started conducting interviews on which to base her characters in Northern California, she wound up in Philly last year, around the same time that the Philadelphia School District had begun letting go of nurses and counselors for financial reasons. "What I heard about and experienced first in Philly was a great need," she says. "It went from there."

She spoke with teachers, students, and victims of the pipeline. She interviewed Strawberry Mansion High School principal Linda Cliatt-Wayman and Common Pleas Court Judge Daniel Anders about their experiences within the system. Without giving away Smith's endgame, what she learned in Philly is similar to what she learned in California: If we don't take care of our youth, we're going to be sorry.

"A California Supreme Court justice told me one very valuable thing regarding kids: If you're not in school, you're in trouble." School teaches kids how to to be productive, responsible citizens, she says, and without it they generally are neither. But she also realizes that the "school-to-prison pipeline" starts earlier than the classroom, that it is a "womb-to-prison" track paved with poverty and violence. "What kind of condition are these children in before they get to school? That's the question."

Smith's next stop in the project puts her closer to a more personal level of truth, her home city of Baltimore. The visit was planned long before the arrest and April 19 death of Freddie Gray and the riots that have ensued. But Smith's goal, always, is to be where the action is, and she'll remain open to all in Baltimore who wish to share their stories with her, stories of a troubling and troubled America.

"This is the story of a war of authority personified by the police and those who suffer from a variety of disadvantages," she says. "We certainly couldn't have predicted this would happen, a time when the citizens of Baltimore and many Americans are concerned about what happens when people are left out," she says. "It is not a pretty picture."

THEATER IN PROGRESS

Anna Deavere Smith

5 p.m. May 5 at the Penn Museum, 3260 South St. Admission free. Information: www.gse.upenn.edu/event

7 p.m. May 11 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St. Tickets: $25. 215-985-0420 or www. philadelphiatheatrecompany. org

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