Anna Deavere Smith

Irena Mausner (n e Frydman) was three-and-a-half years old when the Nazi army invaded Poland in 1939. A few weeks later, they ordered her family to vacate her family home in an elegant Warsaw neighborhood-to leave forever. Irena and her sister, Margaret, hid in a Catholic orphanage on the outskirts of Warsaw during most of the war. Their father, Roman, a soldier in the Polish army, was captured in Budapest in 1944 and taken to a German POW camp; their mother subsisted in the Warsaw Ghetto and then was sent to Ravensbr ck, also in 1944. Improbably, the entire family survived. Thanks to a note that the quick-thinking Margaret had posted to the door frame of their former family home, the Frydmans were reunited. Surviving the Holocaust is just the beginning of Irena's remarkable story. Her memoir takes us through boarding school in London, a happy marriage to a childhood friend of her sister's, and a move to the United States. Raised in conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, and terror, Irena developed a sense of purpose and of perseverance that drove her to a life of academic and professional achievement and material success. More importantly, she absorbed the understanding of impermanence and the importance of decency-qualities that helped her appreciate a happy marriage and overcome a second round of tragedy that struck late in her life.

"Smith's powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope." --The Village Voice Anna Deavere Smith's extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. "One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation" (Variety). Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: "Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.") Using people's own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time--and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.

" An] engrossing collection of testimonials about life, death and the care of the ailing body... Ms. Smith has created a...vivid compendium of life experienced at its extremes, drawn about equally from the suffering and the ministering sides of the story." --New York Times"Vitally important, wide-ranging and ultimately very moving" --Los Angeles TimesFor over thirty years, Anna Deavere Smith has created her own unique form of theatre by exploring the events that have shaped the American psyche--a theatre that documents real-time events through the actual words of those most closely involved. In Let Me Down Easy, Smith creates an indelible gallery of portraits, from a rodeo bull rider to a prize fighter to a New Orleans doctor during Hurricane Katrina, as well as boldface names like former Texas Governor Ann Richards, legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong, network film critic Joel Siegel, and supermodel Lauren Hutton. Their stories are alternately humorous and heart-wrenching, and often a blend of both. Building upon each other with hypnotic force, her subjects recount personal encounters with the frailty of the human body, ranging from a mere brush with mortality, coping with an uncertain future in today's medical establishment, to confronting an end-of-life transition. The testimony of health care professionals adds further texture to a vivid portrayal of the cultural and societal attitudes to matters of health. Anna Deavere Smith is an actor, playwright, and author. Smith's plays are written using the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects and performing their testimonies. These works include the award-winning plays Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror, which was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. Both plays were broadcast on PBS as part of the American Playhouse series.

This diverse anthology features eight contemporary plays founded in testimonies from across the world. Showcasing challenging and provocative works of theatre, the collection also provides a clear insight into the workings of the genre through author interviews, introductions from the companies and performance images which illustrate the process of creating each piece. Bystander 9/11 by Meron Langsner is an impressionistic but wholly authentic response to the catastrophe as it unfolded and in the days following. Big Head by Denise Uyehara is an interrogation of current perceptions of "the enemy now" as seen through the lens of Japanese American internment during World War II. Urban Theatre Projects’ The Fence is a tale of love, belonging and healing. It is a tender work that looks at the adult lives of five family and friends who spent their childhoods in orphanages, institutions and foster homes in Australia. Come Out Eli: Christmas 2002 in Hackney, London, saw the longest siege in British history. Using interviews collected at the time and further material gathered in the aftermath, Alecky Blythe’s play explores the impact of the siege on the lives of individuals and the community. The Travels: members of Forced Entertainment undertook a series of journeys during one summer, each travelling alone to locations in the UK to complete tasks determined only partially in advance. This began a mapping process and the creation of a landscape of ideas, narratives and bad dreams. On the Record by Christine Bacon and Noah Birksted-Breen circumnavigates the globe to bring true stories from six independent journalists, all linked by their determination to shed light on the truth. Created by Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith and Susan Yankowitz, Seven is based on personal interviews with seven women who have triumphed over huge obstacles to catalyse major changes in human rights in their home countries of Russia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Guatemala and Cambodia. Pajarito Nuevo la Lleva: The Sounds of the Coup by María José Contreras Lorenzini focuses upon sense memories of witnesses who were children at the time of the 1974 military coup in Chile.

Two compelling plays by the award-winning dramatist include House Arrest, a portrait of the civil rights movement, racism, and the media as reflected in two hundred years of history of the lives of White House occupants, and Piano, set on the sugar plantation belonging to an aristocratic Cuban family on the eve of the Spanish-American war. Original. 12,500 first printing.

Anna Deveare Smith's award-winning one-woman shows were borne of her uniquely brilliant ability to listen. In Talk to Me she applies her rare talent to the language of political power in America. Believing that character and language are inextricably bound, Smith sets out to discern the essence of America by listening to its people and trying to capture its politics. To that end she travels to some of America's most conspicuous places, like the presidential conventions of 1996, and some of its darkest corners, like a women's prison in Maryland. And along the way she interviews everyone from janitors to murderers to Bill Clinton himself. Memoir, social commentary, meditation on language, this book is as vastly ambitious as it is compellingly unique.

Anna Deavere Smith's stunning new work of "documentary theater" in which she uses verbatim the words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to expose and explore the devastating human impact of that event.