Playwright Anna Deavere Smith turns to her family’s history for inspiration

Public media is no longer federally funded, but the NPR network remains yours in service to and powered by you. Keep public media public with a donation today at donate.npr.org and thank you. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, actor and playwright Anna DeVere Smith, has played a national security advisor on the West Wing, a matriarch on Blackish, and a magazine editor on Inventing Anna.

But for more than fifty years, the work she keeps returning to is America itself. Smith pioneered what we now call documentary or verbatim theater. She interviews people, sometimes hundreds of them, caught inside a national fracture, like a riot or epidemic, and then she stands alone on a stage and performs their exact words. In her 1992 play Fires in the Mirror, she became Crown Heights Brooklyn in the aftermath of a deadly racial conflict. In Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992, she became the city in the days after the Rotney King verdict.

And in her 2016 play Notes from the Field, she examined the school-to-prison pipeline. Here she is as Letitia de Santiago, a parent from Stockton, California, on the lengths she takes to keep her kids out of trouble. And I think I was a very strict mother. Anything involving my kids, I was very involved. I used to even go at nighttime.

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