Tomorrow’s Promises: Let Me Down Easy

David Begelman

            Anne Deveare Smith doesn’t let us down easy, because it’s impossible to experience the often searing dialogue of her two act play—culled from actual interviews the indefatigable actress herself conducted—without asking, “Where have I been when all this was happening?” or “I can’t imagine what some people go through,” or “God, when does it all end?”

The playwright, a committed and extraordinarily compelling performer, is the one woman show she wrote and enacted. It had its world premier at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater on January 9 of this year. Let Me Down Easy is a tour de force of dramatic monologue involving interviews with about thirty actual persons of diverse backgrounds. Parts of the script were enacted before in other venues across the country, and Ms. Smith plays all the individuals interviewed, simulating their accents, dialectics, and speech rhythms, so that they come to life in ways other than what they say about themselves and the way they experience the world.   

Ms. Smith is not without portfolio. An accomplished New York City actress, she also wrote solo pieces entitled, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (about the race riots triggered by the beating of Rodney King), and Fires in the Mirror (about the Crown Heights racial tensions sparked by the death of a black youngster run over by a Hasidic student). She is a Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Medicine, and has is on the faculty in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. She formerly held a faculty position in the Drama Department of Stanford University. She has authored a book, Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines, and has another, Letters to a Young Artist, in preparation. She has appeared in several Hollywood films, and is ongoing roles in television series: The Practice and The West Wing. She has written articles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. She won a 2006 Fletcher Foundation Fellowship award for contributions to civil rights issues, and is the recipient of seventeen honorary degrees. She is also chairs a film board at the Museum of Modern Art. An underachiever she’s not.

Let Me Down Easy was inspired by a project undertaken in grand rounds at the Yale University School of Medicine in 2000. At that time, that playwright’s emerging plan were in her words to “explore the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body,” an artistic goal that seems to color more the second act of her play. In it, such characters as those with cancer and leukemia relate their life experiences in what Ms. Smith characterizes as the “organic poetry” of their narratives. In the first act, there is a bit more of an emphasis on other dimensions of life experiences, such as the relationships interviewees have to their own bodies. These include sports figures like Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, or Brent Williams, the rodeo star, super-models like Veronica Webb, and dancers like Karine Plantadit. But they also include the testimony of female victims of Hutu genocide in Rwanda, Tutsi women called “cockroaches” by their persecutors.

There is more, much more, in Let Me Down Easy than meets the eye, for Ms. Smith has hinted she is innovating a new kind of theater, and one she feels represents a radical departure from more traditional forms. Whether she has succeeded is a complex issue, although there is no denying the terrific impact her diverse scenarios have on audiences. At the end of the performance this reviewer attended, you could count on the fingers of one hand audience members who were not on their feet with standing ovations for this remarkable woman. There is simply no way a theater goer can remain emotionally unruffled by narratives that go from the ungrammatical and insouciant to the excruciating testimony of a Tutsi woman who had her arms hacked off by the Hutus in Rwanda, simply because she had them outstretched once too often in pleading for the life of her child.

Ms. Smith has posed the question, “What role do artists play when it comes to social critiques?” one also framed by Miller, Ibsen, Shaw, and Brecht—although its original provenance was Greek: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Her MacArthur Foundation Award describes her contribution as “…a new form of theatre—a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism, and intimate reverie.” At the same time, there are tensions between the playwright’s performance art and her avowed artistic goals, although they hardly detract from the dramatic impact of the former.

One of Ms. Smith’s problems is that her heart is too big. The thirty interviewees cover an emotional sprawl with an inconceivably wide range of personal experience. There is nothing wrong with range, of course, unless it attempts to deliver individual narratives that are so loosely connected, it becomes difficult to see any unifying theme among them. One is tempted to draw connections among the diverse pieces, albeit at the expense of abstractions that relate separate strands of discourse in such overly inclusive ways, they risk losing the punch. For example, I was inclined to say that the first act of Let Me Down Easy was about a theme of well being, whereas the second act was about being well. But such breezily improvised ideas may only represent arbitrary attempts to straddle what are basically very different discourses.

On a rather different note, Ms. Smith sometimes wavers between claiming her enactments are without editorializing and her becoming polemical in ways that hit you right between the eyes. For example, in a PBS interview with Charlie Rose on April 29, 1994, the playwright insisted that “I try not to take sides,” indicating that she is only “A repeater, a reiterator.” It doesn’t wash. There is quite a difference between a charming account of Lance Armstrong’s relationship to his body, or a rodeo rider’s relationship to his kidneys or nostrils, and an account of victims of Rwandan genocide or federal inattention to New Orleans parishes during Katrina. At the end of the first act, the actress is seen shoveling dirt into a grave in Rwanda, and at the end of the second act descending into the audience with a pot with numerous holes in it, comparing it to official policies of health coverage. She may be acting the part of a person she has interviewed, but her own keen convictions come through loud and clear despite this. Those convictions are reality-bound and clear. There is no such thing as a postmodern “interpretation” of Rwanda or Katrina. The devil there is hardly in the details, nor is evil textually deconstructed by interviewing perpetrators to get their individual spin on things.  

When all is said and done, if  theater goers want an eye-opening, if not shattering, look at a diverse range of human experience, this show is the one to see—fast, before it closes.       

Let Me Down Easy runs at the Long Wharf Theatre Mainstage at 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven from January 9, to February 3, 2008. Tickets may be purchased by calling (203)-787-4282. Website: www.longwharf.org.