Acting Beyond the Self

One of America’s most insightful and incisive dramatists, Anna Deavere Smith, has created a body of work that unpacks the resilient commonalities among countrymen navigating extraordinary circumstances like riots (Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992), living and dying (Let Me Down Easy), and the school-to-prison pipeline (Notes from the Field). Smith’s style of theatre is an American innovation born from the nation’s ever-present predicament of tension, contradiction, and cultural symbiosis. Smith interviews people, studies how they speak, and performs them in one-person shows. On stage, she embodies community and, through the medium of her body, conveys a vision of unity through complexity and identity. Through acting, Smith interrogates how people can change.

Smith is also a prolific teacher with a pedagogy as distinct as her performance style. At New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Smith trains multidisciplinary graduate students. Her theories on teaching performance are distinct.

It’s not about empowering you [the actor], it’s about empowering them [the audience]. You’re already empowered! You’re on stage.

Let’s hone in on Smith’s philosophy through comparison. Constantin Stanislavski taught “the magic if.” Lee Strasberg taught “effective memory.” Jerzy Grotowski taught “the holy actor.” Uta Hagen taught “substitution.” Michael Chekhov taught “psychological gesture.” Stella Adler taught “inner justification.” Stanford Meisner taught “the reality of doing.” All of these approaches encourage self-fascination. Looking back at my notes from class, I found a quote from Smith that encapsulates her stance: “it’s not about you; it’s about the world.” Or, as Smith instructs in her classes, “it’s not about empowering you [the actor], it’s about empowering them [the audience]. You’re already empowered! You’re on stage.”

Smith’s approach to observing the world is through inquiry into English speech. While she is credited with incubating a new style of theatre, verbatim performance, Smith’s approach may be closest to John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare teachings on the creative interpretation of language, cadence, and linguistic patterns.

I’m magnetized to Smith, who was my graduate professor, in part because of her roots in the classical tradition of heightened text. Smith learned how to wear words by performing Shakespeare in graduate school. My introduction to theatre was in New Orleans, where my classicist high school teacher, Greg Baber, drilled the tools of language: alliteration, onomatopoeia, antithesis, builds, sharp consonants, long vowels, and seeing what you say. I found meaning in a linguistic entryway to performance because it was mutually interpretive and practical.

In my hometown, I cut my teeth as a rep player at Tulane University’s Shakespeare Festival. Performing Shakespeare in New Orleans was an instructive set of circumstances because I could relate heightened classical text to the rhythmic colloquialism of the American South and the musical response to that verbal condition via ubiquitous traditional jazz, where wining trombones, pugnacious trumpets, marching percussions, and mellifluous clarinets mimic a street’s lively soundscapes.

Hamlet’s advice to the players, the famous “Speak the speech” monologue, became a Nicene Creed for me, placing focus on delivering language: “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” What is most underplayed about Hamlet’s advice is the social imperative baked into it:

with this special observance, o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

Shakespeare makes the case that theatre can transform society: “one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.” Smith has cited Hamlet’s speech often, including it as an epigraph in Notes from the Field. Indeed, her work is a modern actualization of Shakespeare’s concept of theatre: using words to activate audiences into action.

This wide-ranging interview was initially conducted for the article “Anna Deavere Smith’s 10 Essential Tips for Drama Students” in the April 2025 edition of Backstage. Smith spoke to me over three phone conversations.

Alex Ates: What advice do you have on being ready to study theatre?

Anna Deavere Smith: I was recently with a group of students who are not my students. And I asked, “What are your questions?” All of their questions had to do with themselves. I said, “these are good questions, but could you please expand them beyond you?”

What I like about the way you began your questions was just this idea of how to be ready to study theatre. And I think the first part of the curriculum now needs to be that it's not about you.

It's really all about the students now. Like, how can I have a career? How can I do this? How can I do that? Those are questions for a career advisor. Or a life coach. But they're not the questions that you should take into the study of theatre. The questions should be structured around the world and the humans in it. It shouldn't be about you.

Alex: It seems like theatre education has also changed recently.

Anna: Look, I'm an old fogey. So if you're a new teacher, when you say it's changed, what would you say about that?

Alex: Well, a lot of training programs are relatively new. Colleges keep expanding them. And they're becoming more competitive to get into.

Anna: I just think that in my fifty years of teaching, students have become more interested in self. It's a self-fascination. But I think that the study of theatre should be about the world.

You know, there didn't used to be that many BFA programs. You're right that there's been an increase. There's a market for younger people to be interested in doing this. The question is, why? Because once they get out, it's so competitive. Do they have data on how many people actually work?

Alex: Right. Actors’ Equity's annual income for their members is like $9,000 annually, probably less. So you have to wonder, students are investing quite a lot financially: What's the return? If someone is discerning whether they're going to acting training or not, one of your lessons is that before you develop a voice, you have to develop an ear. How can one cultivate one's ear?

Anna: It goes back to what I started with: What if this craft is not about self? But it's about being an observer of the world. What if it's about empathy? What if it's about really focusing on others?

I don't allow applause in my classes. Because this is an inquiry. If we were in a science lab, they wouldn't clap. And supposedly, we think we should be taken as seriously as the rest of the people in these universities. So why are we clapping about everything we do? It's a real investigation of humans.

Alex: Who helped you develop your ear?

Anna: My ear developed because I was interested in stories. I was interested in Miss Johnson next door, who would send me down the street for a quarter's worth of fatback. I would come back, and she would talk. And to me, that was enough to make my day, to hear stories.

She would talk to me and tell me things. My grandmother would talk to me and tell me things. Anybody! The older people who didn't have that many people to listen to them and didn't have the mobility to go very far were the people I liked to be around because they would tell me things.

Alex: Do you think of these people in your life as teachers?

Anna: No, I think of them as storytellers.

Alex: Can you help me understand that difference?

Anna: They weren't giving me lessons about life. They were just telling me about the past. About their lives and the things that had happened. I don't think of them as teachers. I think they were telling me things that fascinated my imagination. It stimulated my imagination because their stories were things from another time and another world, another way.

Alex: Are there exercises that help define your understanding of theatremaking and it being about the world and being about others?

Anna: I had a teacher who said, “You gotta get down to Gump's,” a department store in San Francisco. The Christmas decorations in the windows are extraordinary—in any town. What is the so-called art? Store windows are art, right? So I think the people who were continually pointing me in these directions that had to do with other kinds of expression were really important.

Somebody told me to go to a big union meeting. In the dock workers' union at the San Francisco port. I went to that meeting and there was this extraordinary singing group from Chile. American dockworkers getting excited about this Chilean singing group, right? It's just anything that was letting me know that there was an expression that was impactful and full of emotion going on and beauty all around me.

It also teaches humility because you think you've just done the best school scene in the world. And then you go down the street to Gump's, the department store, and you cannot believe the beauty of the store windows.

What I'm saying is you need to be in the world. On the one hand, it does need to be, to a certain extent, a monkish, controlled existence. But on the other hand, you should always be in relationship to the world around you.

It also teaches humility because you think you've just done the best school scene in the world. And then you go down the street to Gump's, the department store, and you cannot believe the beauty of the store windows. So it keeps you longing to be a beauty maker.

You're not trapped in the world of the cult of your teacher, in particular. I never had a cult. But wherever I taught, there was somebody who had one. In those days, it tended to be either the pretty boys for certain teachers or pretty girls for others. Thank God that's over.

Alex: How does a teacher see themselves in relationship to their students?

Anna: So, you know, fifty years ago, it was the father who had a lot of power. Or, the kind mother.

I wasn't a white male. So even a white male my age could maybe take on the fatherly thing. So I've always thought of myself more like I'm outside of the family structure, in the way that I approach what I was doing.

And even now, I don't use the word “family” to describe a class. I'd be surprised if I ever did use that word about how we are. I'm always looking for words so I don't have to write “dear all.” This year, it's “Sequoia” because I wanted my students to think about being rooted.

How does the teacher see themselves in relationship to this group? Is it a team? Is it a gang? Is it Cub Scouts? Is it a family?

I think that how the teacher sees themselves in relationship is really important, and it should not be ignored. For a while, I was really interested in all kinds of people who dealt with other human beings: hairdressers, psychiatrists, because I became very aware of what it meant to be taking on all of this stuff that the students are bringing.

I read something about swim coaches for Olympic swimmers, and one of them wrote that they would always pay attention to the slowest person, or the least likely to win. Because the ones who knew they were winners, or thought they were winners, were like, “Why are you paying so much attention to that person?” And then that person, from that attention, would jump forward. And the ones who were so sure they were winners would be shocked. It's like, where did that come from? And so for a while, as a young teacher, I was really conscious of that. Like, who is the person here that the rest of the class is treating like a loser? Because they've already decided who the star is. And so, I would do that. And that person would leap forward.

There is a group dynamic that you, as a teacher, are important in creating. But there's also a dynamic students already have. Students have a relationship outside of the class, with each other.

The class belongs to them. And students take more responsibility. If I'm successful, I'm talking a lot in the beginning, and much less at the end.

When I was very young, on the first day of class, I would say “Actually, I'm not going to be the leader. I just have a feeling there's going to be another person in this room, who's going to have a lot of leading potential. And so what I'm going to do, I'm going to leave the room and I want you to elect that person. And that person is going to be your stage manager. And like in Equity, the stage manager is there, in some ways, to be for you.” And I would leave, this was years ago, and every time it was the tallest white guy in the room. Now, I have something more widespread, which is that everybody in the class has a role. So everybody has responsibility for our class. It's not just me. The class belongs to them. And students take more responsibility. If I'm successful, I'm talking a lot in the beginning, and much less at the end. That is a pedagogy that I developed much later in my career, teaching graduate students.

Theatre is also a culture. Right? Art-making may or may not be. Painting may or may not be. I think theatre has to be a community and everybody has to have a role. It seems to me that school pedagogies of young people should be teaching them about those roles and those responsibilities very early on. Students need that in terms of how they have dignity in the world as artists.

I mean we saw that happen with Me Too, right? All of a sudden it's not okay. It's not okay. This is the case in one of the shows I was on that every time there was a scene about a blowjob, suddenly, all of the male people from all over the place came to watch the scene.

Alex: Oh, geez.

Anna: Yeah. And, and why did there have to be so many takes?

Me Too, there were good things and bad things about it, but one good thing was it's like, no, we're gonna be more respectful to the people who have to make their bodies vulnerable in this environment. 

Alex: When preparing your body for vulnerability: What are some other things you would recommend for emerging actors readying themselves for the physical act of this sort of work and this culture?

Anna: Just take care of yourself. Dancers do that because the body won't work if they don't, and singers do that because the body won't work if they don't.

For actors, I don't know how much that's really essential. Look, everybody has a different kind of body, and everybody's body does different things, right? There are really talented people who take drugs and drink alcohol and don't go to sleep at night.

At the very least, know what your body can withstand, rather than being dogmatic about it.

Alex: Going back to the classroom culture, how should students navigate honest critiques?

Anna: In Letters to a Young Artist, I write that you need to be developing, which is very hard, your own sense of whether it worked or not. It's “the Man in the Mirror.”

That is so hard for us as human beings to do. You know, we're talking about self. But to really see it. It takes years because you look back and you think, “Well, why did I do that? That was dumb—or—that wasn't very nice. Why did I do that?” Because in the moment, we're complicated and we don't know everything. To develop a kind of an eye for what you've just done is really important. You can't do that if you aren't willing to start listening. The most important thing is to get rid of “it was good.” You have to stop listening for that. You're not a dog, right? That's how we train dogs. It's a more intellectual prospect than “good girl, good boy.” And so, you've got to be able to take it in and build a system that over time will know what lands and what doesn't land.

It's very difficult. For young people, it has to be more than, “Did I do anything right?” If you say that to your teacher, you're not listening. There's nothing really specific that you can tell your students. Everything's couched in metaphors. There's nothing explicit. Because the art form is a metaphor. It's not as explicit as dance or music because you're dealing with this whole sort of psyche. And all you can do is make suggestions.

And every once in a while, you're going to say, “that was fantastic.” But it doesn't do any good to listen for that. And the other thing—and it's hard—pay equal attention, if not more, to what the teacher is saying to somebody else. Because then you get a sense of how the teacher is talking. You get a sense of the values of the teacher. And that's just one teacher in the many ones you're gonna have.

Like, I don't like overconfident behavior, and I say that from the beginning. There are other teachers who love swagger. And you get to go get your swagger cultivated by that person, but not from me.

Alex: Is swagger just a disguise?

Anna: Well, swagger's good. People like swagger. You'll learn about humility from me.

This year, at the bottom of my syllabus, I wrote, “Know who you're studying with.” My specialty is emotions and language. Take advantage of that. I just think that students need to do that. They shouldn't think of a teacher, a creative person, as an authority, but a relationship. Understand the limitations of that person.

Alex: Are there books or plays, or materials that you go back to to fortify yourself and to reinvigorate your sense of the craft?

Anna: There are certain things.

There's Beethoven's Ninth. It's an amazing work of art. And I think it's a very hopeful work of art. It's “Ode to Joy.”

There's an interview between Mike Wallace and Lorraine Hansberry that I really like. She actually has a lot of swagger. She was opening Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. And the way she deals with him is amazing. It is a work of art how she deals with that man.

I did the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery this year and I framed the lectures in this beautiful painting by Jack Whitten called Atopolis. It's a word he made up. It's no place without place.

It's really about, in the end, how you have to work very hard to find belonging. It's not given to you.