Anna Deavere Smith Takes You To Prison
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.6 • 924 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 | I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still |
| 0:06.1 | watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you, |
| 0:12.7 | soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making, |
| 0:18.0 | Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago. |
| 0:25.7 | Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure. |
| 0:28.3 | Listen wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:34.7 | From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette. |
| 0:35.8 | I'm Tricia Bobita. |
| 0:37.4 | And I am Greta Johnson. |
| 0:41.9 | Nurdette is a show where we talk to people about their obsessions, people who are scientists and poets, astronauts, and adventurers, people who dare to ask big questions and explore the unknown. |
| 0:47.1 | Our guest this week has built much of her life's work, getting us to think about the lives |
| 0:51.6 | of those around us. I think of my plays as a series of portraits |
| 0:55.5 | or in the case of this one of a big tapestry where I'm looking as much for different colors |
| 1:01.7 | as I am for opinions and facts. Anna Devere Smith, she is, I think, in my top three all-time |
| 1:09.6 | favorite storytellers, artists. I don't want to have to |
| 1:13.7 | choose really like the top one. Right. It's a tier. Best friend is not a person. It's a tear, |
| 1:19.2 | as Mindy Kaling would say. And Anna DeVier Smith is for me, I think, one of the most interesting |
| 1:24.7 | storytellers alive, one of the most interesting storytellers working. She's also famous and beloved by me and many as Nancy McNally on the West Wing, |
| 1:32.4 | where she's an actress. But as a playwright, she actually does something even more unique. |
| 1:37.0 | She's one of the most prolific writers of documentary style theater. And her scripts are based |
| 1:41.7 | on verbatim interviews. She conducts with real people. |
| 1:44.4 | Totally. Anna has made about 20 plays in this documentary style. Her most recent one is called |
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