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WELLESLEY,
Mass. -- Wellesley College will celebrate its Quintessence
Day 2004 with award-winning author and performer Anna
Deavere Smith Wednesday, Feb. 18, at 7 pm in Alumnae
Hall. Smith will offer a lecture, “Snapshots: Glimpses
of America in Change,” which examines issues of
race, community and character in America. The event is
free and open to the public.
"Quintessence Day is a celebration of black womanhood
and achievement, and in Anna Deavere Smith many students
at Wellesley, from across the racial spectrum, have found
a role model and an inspiration," said event organizer
Natalie L. Maddox, a sophomore at Wellesley who serves
as the Quintessence Chair 2003-2004.
Hailed
by Newsweek as “the most exciting individual
in American theater,” Smith is a playwright and performance
artist who uses her singular brand of theater to explore
the issues of our time. She was awarded the prestigious
MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellowship for
creating “a new form of theater — a blend of
theatrical art, social commentary, journalism and intimate
reverie.”
She
is perhaps best known as the author and performer of
two one-woman plays about racial tensions in American
cities — Fires in the Mirror (Obie Award-winner and
runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize) and Twilight: Los
Angeles 1992 (Obie Award-winner and Tony Award nominee). Combining
the journalistic technique of interviewing subjects from
all walks of life with the art of recreating their words
in performance, Smith transforms herself onstage into an
astonishing number of characters (up to 46 in one show),
expressing their own points of view on controversial issues.
From
learning Korean to play a shop owner devastated by the
Rodney King riots to rehearsing (to idiosyncratic perfection)
such well-known figures as Al Sharpton and oral historian
Studs Terkel, Smith extends her great artistic ability
to depict America’s immense diversity in culture
and thought.
Smith
plays National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s The
West Wing and co-starred in the CBS drama,
Presidio Med, a series by the original writing/producing
team for NBC’s ER. She has appeared in the films
The Human Stain, Philadelphia, Dave, The
American President and on TV’s The
Practice. The film version of Twilight premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. She also
is the author of Talk to Me: Travels in Media & Politics,
which documents the creative process behind her play, House
Arrest. In an effort to discern the mythic role of the
presidency in American society, Smith interviews more than
400 people from all walks of life, from prison inmates
to President Clinton. The New York Times Book Review wrote, “[The
book] succeeds in teaching one crucial lesson: those who
truly listen, truly hear.”
In
1998, in association with the Ford Foundation, Smith
founded the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue
at Harvard. The Institute's mission is to explore the role
of the arts in relation to vital social issues. Smith is
a tenured professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at
New York University and is affiliated with the NYU School
of Law, where she teaches a course on “The Art of
Listening.” She is currently working on a new book,
Letter to a Young Artist.
The lecture is sponsored by Harambee House, Ethos and
a number of other departments, programs and groups on the
Wellesley campus. For more information, call 781-283-1760.
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