The answer was an emphatic no, but she stayed on the phone and asked about classes for actors, which led to an audition and enrollment.Ī transformative moment came early in her training, when Smith encountered Shakespeare. Their goal, as she put it in her memoir, Talk to Me, was “to see America and to make sense, each in our own way, of what to do with all the breakage and promise that had been released through the antiwar movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the beginning of the environmental movement, and the bra-burning, brief as it was, of the women’s movement.” Casting about for a line of work that would suit her, Smith called up the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and asked if they were looking to hire a stage manager. As one of only a few African-American students at Beaver College in the 1960s, she recently told NEH Chairman William Adams, she helped form a black student group, which led to changes to the curriculum and to the hiring of the school’s first black professor.Īfter graduation, she drove west with four friends. In middle school, she discovered a gift for mimicry in college, an interest in social justice. Smith was born on September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland, the first of five children to Anna, an elementary school educator, and Deaver, a coffee merchant. A hybrid artist if ever there was one, she collects stories through recorded interviews and then personally portrays the tellers on stage, in curated displays of American character organized around pressing questions of our time. Even in an era when anyone with a computer connection can broadcast their own life story for everyone or no one to consider, Anna Deavere Smith continues to shock and dazzle audiences with her stage portraits of the humble and the great.

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