Diversity and Doubleness in Anna Deavere Smith's on The
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1W (FLEXIBLE CASTING): DIVERSITY AND DOUBLENESS IN ANNA DEAVERE SMITH’S ON THE ROAD: A SEARCH FOR AMERICAN CHARACTER DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Mark Jeffrey Seamon, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2005 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Dr. Joy Harriman Reilly, Adviser Dr. Lesley Ferris _______________________ Adviser Dr. Alan Woods Theatre Graduate Program Copyright by Mark Jeffrey Seamon 2005 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith’s critically acclaimed series, On the Road: A Search for American Character. Focusing on the project’s thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth installments, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, and House Arrest: A Search for American Character In and Around the White House, Past and Present, respectively, this study demonstrates how diversity and doubleness serve as the foundation of Smith’s dramaturgical investigation into the relationship between language and character. Smith focuses on communities experiencing socio-political duress and persons whose voices have gone largely unheard within those communities. In collecting, editing, and performing verbatim excerpts from interviews with white, African American, Korean, Latino, and Jewish women and men, Smith’s interest in cultural diversity plays a crucial role in fulfilling the mission of On the Road: to make connections between the seemingly disconnected and spark productive discussion about matters of race. Characters in Smith’s dramas regularly reveal a sense of double consciousness, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois’s influential concept, grappling with their awareness of themselves as racial minorities and how their identities are viewed as “other” by the dominant culture. ii Furthermore, many events upon which the plays are based are shown to have double meanings and be open to a wide range of interpretation. The same holds true for the imperfect but poetic language employed by characters to describe these events. By presenting a panoply of voices and exploring events from multiple perspectives, Smith investigates how and why disagreements, tensions, failures to understand, and inabilities to communicate have plagued the diverse populations of Crown Heights, Los Angeles, and the United States. This dissertation also explores how Smith’s multiple identities as African American, woman, interviewer, playwright, and actor complicate her staged representations of character and are essential to reading her work in production. Finally, it examines the plays’ production histories and critical response, weighing the consequences of how critics did and did not take into account arguably the most important character of all in On the Road: Smith herself. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the many teachers who have provided me with mentorship and support throughout my theatre studies, especially my adviser, Dr. Joy Reilly. I am forever grateful for her insight and the emotional support she provided me during this process. My sincere gratitude goes to Dr. Lesley Ferris and Dr. Alan Woods for their time and effort as members of my dissertation committee. I am deeply appreciative of Dr. Esther Beth Sullivan, who offered valuable guidance in developing the dissertation. I am grateful also to Dr. Leah Lowe and Dr. Thomas Postlewait for their counsel and mentorship throughout this process. I am indebted to the staff of The Ohio State University’s Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute, especially Val Pennington, who aided me in my research. I extend my appreciation to those individuals who granted me interviews or responded to my inquiries, including Toni-Leslie James, Carol Martin, and Ric Wanetik. Finally, I must express my gratitude for my family, my parents David Michael Seamon and Cheryl Lee Seamon, my parents-in-law William Richey Graf, Jr. and Martha Bush Graf, and my wife Lauren Graf Seamon for her love, kindness, and endless encouragement. iv VITA March 26, 1976 Born – Grand Rapids, Michigan 1998 B.A. Communication and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 2001 M.A. Theatre, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 2002-present Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. Mark Seamon, Rev. of Death and the Ploughman, created and performed by SITI Company, dir. Anne Bogart, Theatre Journal 56.4 (Dec. 2004): 697-8. 2. Mark Seamon, Rev. of Worthy But Neglected: Plays of the Mint Theater Company, ed. Jonathan Bank, Theatre Topics 13.2 (Sept. 2003): 253-4. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Theatre v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………………………………………iv Vita …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………v Chapters: 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….1 2. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities………………………..…..21 Introduction…………...…..……………………………………….…………………………..21 Background on Crown Heights, Brooklyn (1991)…….….……………………….22 Background on Smith’s Production…………….………….…………………………..23 Character as Theme……………………………………………….………………………….24 Smith in Performance………………………………………………………………………..49 Critical Response to Smith in Performance…….………..………………………….66 3. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992……………………………………………………………………………...75 Introduction…………...…..……………………………………….…………………………..75 Background on Los Angeles, California (1992)………..….……………………….77 Background on Smith’s Production…………….………….…………………………..79 Character as Theme……………………………………………….………………………….80 Masculinity and Violence……….………………..………………………………………..86 Racial Problematization…………………………..……………..……………………..…100 Violence and Media……………....………………..………………………………………106 Smith in Performance..…………….……………..……………………………………….117 Critical Response to Smith in Performance………………..……………………...135 vi 4. House Arrest: A Search for American Character In and Around the White House, Past and Present…..…………………………………………………….146 Introduction…………...…..……………………………………….………………….……..146 Background on Smith’s Production…………….………….…………………….…..148 Media and Politics……………………………………………………………………………151 Character as Theme……………………………………………….……….……………….162 Race, Class, and Gender…………..………………………………………………….…..189 Paradox of Critique………..………………………...…………..……………..………….197 Critical Response to Smith in Performance………………………….…………….208 5. Conclusion …..…………………………………………………………………………………………..228 Appendices: Appendix A Chronologies .…………………………………………………………………………………237 Appendix B House Arrest Interviewees…………….…………………………………………………….250 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………….258 Historical/Critical/Theoretical Sources...…………………………….…………….259 Newspaper and Magazine Articles……………………………………………………..264 Media & Miscellaneous Sources………………..……………………………….……..267 Reviews of Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities..268 Reviews of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992…………….…………………………………..272 Reviews of House Arrest…………………………………………………….……………….276 Works by Anna Deavere Smith……………………….………………………………..278 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “I believe that character is the struggle to say what we think. Character is the struggle to put things into language.”1 The creative impetus for Anna Deavere Smith’s On the Road: A Search for American Character derived from a book of Native American poetry, a childhood memory of the playwright’s grandfather, Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret, Sophia Loren, Joan Rivers, and Johnny Carson. It is appropriate that these diverse and seemingly unrelated sources inspired her work, as Smith strives for similar coherency through apparent disjointedness in her dramaturgy. This is best evidenced by a trio of documentary dramas belonging to her On the Road series. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities explores tensions and commonalities in the relationship between the African American and Hasidic Jewish communities of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 considers how L.A.’s diverse populations, including its African American, Korean, Latino, and white 1 Anna Deavere Smith, qtd. in Neil Martin, “On Race, Riots and National Recognition,” Palo Alto Weekly 18 Mar. 1994 <http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/cover/1994_Mar_18.QAAR18.html>. 1 communities, are inextricably linked to one another despite their dissimilarities. House Arrest: A Search for American Character In and Around the White House, Past and Present examines how contrasting attitudes about sex, race, and politics throughout American history have come to shape modern sensibilities toward these subjects. Smith’s methodology is to juxtapose multiple perspectives by jumping from one group’s point of view to another’s and back again, showing how people are connected not merely in terms of geography but also through their disconnectedness. Her use of verbatim and often imperfect dialogue appears also to lack continuity, until the realization is made that the extraordinariness of how people speak is yet another shared point. An inquiry into contemporary American life, On the Road makes connections between “things that don’t fit together,” pursues “relationships of the unlikely,” and aims to help Americans “assemble our obvious differences.”2 At the heart of this search for American character is Smith’s abiding interest in race, community, and language. Before On the Road was set in motion in the early 1980s, Smith was already experimenting with the power of words. She