Anna Deavere Smith Takes You To Prison
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2018
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anna Deavere Smith might be best known for her acting roles on NBC’s The West Wing and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie. But she’s also one of the most prolific playwrights of “documentary-style theater,” where she uses verbatim interviews as source material in hopes of pushing her audience toward “an adjustment in the way that they think.”
Her latest work is a one-woman show called Notes From The Field, which was recently released on HBO. It examines how minority students living in poverty often end up incarcerated. To make it, Smith interviewed 250 people affected by the school-to-prison pipeline, including inmates, educators, and witnesses to injustice.
Smith told Nerdette co-host Tricia Bobeda about how she made Notes From The Field and what she hopes it will achieve.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events. |
| 0:05.0 | Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more. |
| 0:09.0 | Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org slash events. |
| 0:15.0 | From W beasy Chicago, this is Nurdette. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm Tricia Bobita. |
| 0:20.0 | And I am Greta Johnson. |
| 0:22.0 | Nurdette is a show where we talk to people about their obsessions, |
| 0:25.0 | people who are scientists and poets, astronauts and adventurers, |
| 0:28.0 | people who dare to ask big questions and explore the unknown. |
| 0:31.0 | Our guest this week has built much of her life's |
| 0:33.8 | work getting us to think about the lives of those around us. I think of my |
| 0:38.3 | plays as a series of portraits or in the case of this one of a big tapestry where I'm looking as much for different |
| 0:45.8 | colors as I am for opinions and facts. |
| 0:50.0 | Anna Devir Smith, she is, I think, in my top three all-time favorite storytellers, artists. I don't want to have to choose really like the top one. |
| 1:00.0 | But she... Best friend is not a person, it's a tear, as Mindy Cayling would say. |
| 1:05.6 | And Anna Devir Smith is, for me, I think, one of the most interesting storytellers alive, |
| 1:10.6 | one of the most interesting storytellers working. |
| 1:12.6 | She's also famous and beloved by me and many as Nancy McNally on the West Wing where she's an |
| 1:17.3 | actress, but as a playwright she actually does something even more unique. |
| 1:21.4 | She's one of the most prolific writers of documentary style |
| 1:24.4 | theater and her scripts are based on verbatim interviews she conducts with |
| 1:28.2 | real people. Totally Anna has made about 20 plays in this documentary style. |
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