ZACH Theatre – An Austin Theatre Blog

Jan. 19, 2012 Update: Now watch the full episode live below!

Anna Deavere Smith in LET ME DOWN EASY

On Friday, the show that started at ZACH, underwritten by The Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, aired on PBS (locally KLRU) as part of the nationally broadcast “Great Performances” series.

Anna Deavere Smith workshopped the show at ZACH Theatre, premiering it to Austin audiences in April 2009. It was an instant sensation!

Called “the most exciting individual in American theater” by Newsweek magazine, Anna Deavere Smith (The West Wing, Nurse Jackie) turns her theatrical exploration to matters of the human body in Let Me Down Easy.

As in her acclaimed earlier plays Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, Deavere Smith interviews an eclectic range of people, and then performs as the interviewee in their own words.

This new gallery of indelible portraits ranges from boldface names like Austin cyclist Lance Armstrong, supermodel Lauren Hutton and Texas Governor Ann Richards, to lesser known but equally memorable characters including a rodeo bull rider, a New Orleans hospital doctor and the director of a South African orphanage — all sharing their searing experiences in confronting the price and politics of health, facing the end of life, and encountering the ultimate resilience of the human spirit.

From PBS’s website:

Having been credited with creating a new form of theater, to create Let Me Down Easy Smith interviewed an eclectic group of people (300 on three continents) and performs several in an evening that is funny, moving and engaging.

The title resonates on several levels reverberating with meanings of lost love, the faith that sustains people in times of difficulty, and ultimately, the end of life.

Smith, through her chameleon-like virtuosity, creates an indelible gallery of portraits, from a rodeo bull rider to a prize fighter to a New Orleans doctor during Hurricane Katrina, as well as boldface names like former Texas Governor Ann Richards, legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong, network film critic Joel Siegel, and supermodel Lauren Hutton. She performs 19 characters in the course of an hour and thirty five minutes. Their stories are alternately humorous and heart-wrenching, and often a blend of both. Building upon each other with hypnotic force, her subjects recount personal encounters with the frailty of the human body, ranging from a mere brush with mortality, coping with an uncertain future in today’s medical establishment, to confronting an end of life transition. The testimony of health care professionals adds further texture to a vivid portrayal of the cultural and societal attitudes to matters of health.

With keen observation and understated compassion, Smith – without judgment and maintaining the dignity of her subjects at all times — effortlessly submerges her own persona, and assumes her characters’ vocal and physical mannerisms with unerring accuracy.

Despite the profound poignancy of the issues at hand, Smith leavens the evening with many lighter anecdotes, some outright hilarious: choreographer Elizabeth Streb recounts how she accidentally set herself on fire as part of an elaborate birthday celebration; Smith’s own Aunt (Lorraine Colman) recalls the last (and distinctly unsentimental) words uttered by her elder sister; and when a Yale School of Medicine oncology fellow informs cancer patient Ruth Katz that the hospital has lost her records — he is dumbfounded to discover she is actually the associate dean of the medical school there. Other characters address the intensity of the will to live even in the face of dire sickness: University of Notre Dame musicologist Susan Youens rhapsodizes on the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, one of over a thousand works Schubert composed before his untimely death at age 31; and while undergoing chemotherapy, Ann Richards defiantly tells of learning how to hang up the phone to preserve her precious “Chi.”

Called “the most exciting individual in American theater” by Newsweek magazine, Smith (Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles) turns on this occasion to tell a powerful story which points to the financial and psychological cost of care, the preciousness of life and the inevitability of our mortality.

“Even in the darkest hour, even where the crisis is the greatest, you’ll often find people who have the gift of grace, the gift of kindness, the gift of healing,” Smith observed. “Ultimately, through this play I am trying to spark a conversation that is easier, and maybe more enjoyable to have through art and entertainment than through politics.”

Let Me Down Easy was inspired by work she did at Yale School of Medicine, where she was invited as a visiting professor. Bill Moyers dedicated a full hour segment to profiling Ms. Smith and Let Me Down Easy, noting with amazement how her play transformed “a houseful of strangers” into “an intimate community.”

Throughout the evening, Smith assumes the parts of (in order):

• James H. Cone, author, reverend, and professor, Union Theological Seminary, NYC
• Elizabeth Streb, choreographer, Streb Dance Company, NYC
• Brent Williams, rodeo bull rider, Idaho
• Lance Armstrong, Tour de France Victor
• Sally Jenkins, sports columnist, The Washington Post
• Michael Bentt, world champion heavyweight boxer
• Hazel Merritt, patient, Yale-New Haven Hospital
• Lauren Hutton, supermodel
• Ruth Katz, patient, Yale-New Haven Hospital
• Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, physician, Charity Hospital, New Orleans
• Dr. Phillip A. Pizzo, dean, Stanford University School of Medicine
• Susan Youens, Musicologist, University of Notre Dame
• Eduardo Bruera, palliative care M.D., Anderson Cancer Center
• Ann Richards, former governor, Texas
• Lorraine Coleman, retired teacher, Anna Deavere Smith’s aunt
• Joel Siegel, ABC movie critic
• Peter Gomes, reverend, Memorial Church, Harvard University
• Trudy Howell, director, Chance Orphanage, Johannesburg
• Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk, author, French translator for the Dalai Lama

NBC’s Today raved, “Run – do not walk – to see this play! Watching Anna Deavere Smith on stage is magical. One minute you are laughing, the next you are crying. It is truly brilliant and stunning.” Variety heralded the work as “a totally vital piece of theater, mixing a standup comic’s instincts with a great reporter’s keen eye.” It was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 of 2009.

On the West Coast, the San Francisco Chronicle declared the work “extraordinary,” and added, “This is Smith at the top of her unique documentary theater form, in writing, performance, and timeliness.”

Smith has been credited with creating a new form of theater. When granted the prestigious MacArthur Award, her work was described as “a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism and intimate reverie.” She has performed in film and TV as well as on stage. She currently plays Gloria Akalitus on Showtime’s hit series Nurse Jackie, and is well remembered for her role of national security advisor Nancy McNally on NBC’s The West Wing. Her major film credits include “The American President,” “Philadelphia,” and “Rachel Getting Married.”

Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles played around the U.S. and on Broadway. It received two Tony nominations, an Obie, Drama Desk Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle’s Special Citation and numerous other honors.

She produced, wrote and performed the film version of Twilight for PBS. Another of her plays, Fires in the Mirror, examined the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn (1991), when racial tensions between black and Jewish neighbors exploded. It received an Obie Award, numerous other awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She performed the play around the U.S., in London and in Australia. The film version was also broadcast on PBS.

Let Me Down Easy – directed for the stage by theater and opera director Leonard Foglia — was directed for television by veteran Matthew Diamond (Cyrano de Bergerac, From Broadway: Fosse, Swan Lake with American Ballet Theatre, all for Great Performances, and an Oscar nominee for the 1999 documentary Dancemaker).

After its Arena Stage run, the production embarked on a national tour with stops at The Wexner Center for the Arts; Philadelphia Theatre Company; a collaborative presentation of San Diego REPertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, and the Vantage Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and The Broad Stage.

Great Performances is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Irene Diamond Fund, Vivian Milstein, the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, the Starr Foundation and Joseph A. Wilson, LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust,public television viewers, and PBS. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell and Mitch Owgang are producers; O’Donnell is series producer; David Horn is executive producer.

Visit PBS online at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/ for videos and more behind-the-scenes information, images and interviews about Friday’s broadcast.

The strength and resilience of the human spirit and body underlies Anna Deavere Smith’s production of LET ME DOWN EASY.

This weekend, she opened the play to sold out crowds and received two curtain calls at every performance. You could tell the play resonated with the audiences as dozens of theatre goers lingered in the lobby to talk about Ms. Smith’s performance — and some unexpected, topical themes that she tackles — for hours after the play ended.

Many patrons were surprised to see that her documentary-style theatrical performance of diverse characters like Lance Armstrong, Ann Richards, Eve Ensler and Joel Siegel were focused on a debate at the forefront of modern politics: healthcare.

The healthcare debate is center stage in LET ME DOWN EASY. In fact, Ms. Smith initially began work on the show at the behest of Yale University Medical School eight years ago, and several of the 29 vibrant characters she features are directly involved in the medical profession — as physicians or academics in that field.

But all of the characters’ lives are centered around the overarching role that health plays as they traverse life. Take Ann Richards, one of the audience favorites, for example. When Ms. Smith assumes Gov. Richards boisterous persona, Richards is quick to note that she thinks that the healthcare team assigned to her must’ve been custom picked: “One thing I’m sure of is that there are no Republicans on my team.” As Gov. Richards learned a new terse reply, “I can’t talk right now, you’re using up my chi,” she iterates how her struggle with cancer stripped her of her hand-shaking trademark personality around which she built her life in politics. Her declining health turned her life upside down, and, in an odd way, tried to take away her identity before it took her life.

Carrington Marzette, a teenage leukemia patient from Midland, Texas, is one of the most poignant characters from the show. She attended the opening night performance at ZACH Theatre on Saturday, and audience members who met her were impressed by Ms. Smith’s ability to convey her exact essence. Ms. Smith told ZACH Theatre she was impressed by the strength of this 16-year-old girl, who tells us matter-of-factly about how she shouldered the responsibility of dealing with doctors and her treatment during her 16th birthday. The audience was spellbound as Carrington bravely and humbly watched the show.

Washington Post sports writer Sally Jenkins is also featured in LET ME DOWN EASY. She makes an interesting point: How does telling athletes that performance enhancing drugs are dangerous really deter them? A Gold Medal Olympic downhill skier, among the most daring of all professional athletes, builds his or her career on taking risks.

All-in-all, each of the vibrant 29 characters featured in this 90-minute production are out-of-the-box luminaries on the healthcare debate, intentionally or not, and the selection, placement and overall composition of LET ME DOWN EASY is the exact kind of genius that insiders in Washington just can’t seem to grasp. This is a theatre experience like no other, humorous and touching, political and apolitical, moving, poignant and centered around the joy and resilience of the human spirit and body. Don’t miss it.

For tickets, call (512) 476-0541, x1. $15 student rush tickets are available at the box office one hour before all shows, with a student ID.

At the first preview performances of LET ME DOWN EASY, Anna Deavere Smith received an extended, standing ovation and two curtain calls for creating over 23 rapid fire, compelling characters in just 90 minutes. Afterwards, you could hear audience members asking each other “Who was your favorite character?” “Well, who was yours?” And you’ll have your favorites, too …

The Opening Night performance is tomorrow, Saturday, April 18, and most shows during her short 4 week run are almost sold out. She plays Tuesday through Sunday at 8pm, and there’s also a 2:30pm Sunday matinee performance.

Gideon Lester, the Acting Artistic Director and Dramaturg at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., wrote a compelling editorial history this week about this iconic new play hitting the Austin stage:

Anna Deavere Smith’s plays are like living organisms that evolve over many years. No two productions are exactly alike; she continuously adapts and reshapes the script to reflect the community for whom she is performing, and the discoveries she has made on her journey. The version of LET ME DOWN EASY that you will see at ZACH is part of an ongoing project that has lasted for more than a decade. Anna’s previous performances of the play were substantially different in their emphasis and form, and she will go on developing it in future incarnations. This live-ness is central to Anna’s theatre; part of the thrill of watching her perform is the sense that she is talking directly to you on this particular evening, and that her words may be resonating differently for everyone in the audience.

The long journey of LET ME DOWN EASY began in 1998, when Anna was invited by Yale University Medical School to interview doctors and patients, and to perform the interviews at the Medical School’s lecture series, known as “grand rounds.” That experience was followed by a commission from Stanford Medical School, and research at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Anna conducted many more interviews, some of which she performed in a series of staged readings at ZACH. While investigating the American healthcare system, Anna came to understand that a central subject of LET ME DOWN EASY would be the resilience and vulnerability of the human body. She embarked on a series of interviews with people who had extreme relations with their bodies: athletes and supermodels, cowboys, dancers, and sex workers, men and women at the peak of physical perfection, and people suffering from debilitating and life-altering diseases. She traveled to Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa, meeting with victims and perpetrators of genocide, and to New Orleans to talk to doctors, journalists, and citizens dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

While developing LET ME DOWN EASY, Anna has interviewed literally hundreds of people; you’ll meet fewer than ten percent of them this evening. She has developed such an encyclopedic wealth of material that the play can serve many contexts; she has performed sections of it at universities, conferences, and medical schools, as well as theatres.

Whether she is examining a historical event – racial and religious tension in Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 and Fires in the Mirror, the role of the American presidency in House Arrest – or pursuing a less journalistic, more philosophical line of inquiry like that of LET ME DOWN EASY, Anna’s fundamental subject is always human complexity. In her performances she represents many opinions and voices without prioritizing or endorsing any of them. As the theatre critic John Lahr observes, she approaches her subject in LET ME DOWN EASY by “looking at it sideways…through its reflection.” The play is composed as a democratic, inclusive collage; it is not a linear argument with a tidy moral and conclusion, but a celebration of the diversity and breadth of the human experience.

LET ME DOWN EASY received its first formal production last year at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT, where the play focused on the body in extremis. Then in the fall, Anna developed and performed a second version at the theatre where I work, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. In a sense this was a companion piece to the first production; a search for grace and kindness in a competitive and sometimes distressing world. If at Long Wharf Anna was investigating the body, at ART her subject was the human spirit. To prepare for it, she conducted many new interviews with artists, professors, philosophers, and clerics from many religions, who provided many definitions and interpretations of grace drawn from their own experience and expertise.

The version of LET ME DOWN EASY that you’ll see at ZACH combines elements from both previous productions with material that Anna has never performed before. She continues to investigate resilience, vulnerability, and grace, of body and spirit – the forces, internal and external that keep us alive and strong, and those that lead to our ultimate demise. Her performance reminds us that all these forces, generative and destructive, are of course profoundly connected; one can only talk about death by thinking about survival and life. As Angie Farmer, the mother of a cancer patient in Houston, told Anna, “Living – that’s what you learn from this experience. You don’t learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

Tickets are available online, or by phone at (512) 476-0541, x1.

Anna Deavere Smith takes stage tonight with a revolution in Austin theatre. LET ME DOWN EASY is about “the power and vulnerability of the human body and the resilience of the human spirit,” she said. With most every theater community in the country welcoming her to their stage to develop LET ME DOWN EASY, she chose Austin, and, specifically, ZACH Theatre — where she first encountered many of the characters she portrays in the production.

But her journey developing this play began 8 years ago at Yale University, where she was a visiting professor. Yale Medical School sought to develop a more sophisticated relationship between its doctors and patients, so Ms. Smith embarked on a long process to explore doctor-patient relationships, with a different concern than physicians. Ultimately, she said, this was about teaching professionals — already adept at their craft — to listen.

“We’re lucky if we get 15 minutes with doctors,” she told ZACH. “Understandably, doctors are often too busy to listen, and patients often don’t know how to communicate their illness.”

As this momentous project takes stage tonight, after 8 incredible years of development, we thought it would be a good idea to look back to where it started, an article with Ms. Smith from Spring 2001’s issue of Yale Medicine, partially re-published here with permission:

A dramatic turn

The doctor-patient relationship takes center stage in performer Anna Deavere Smith’s interpretation of medicine at Yale.

Story by Cathy Shufro
Photographs by Michael Marsland

The playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith stands in the well of Fitkin Amphitheater musing about how patients and doctors manage to communicate under pressure when she slips on a white coat and transforms herself into Yale physician Asghar Rastegar, M.D. “I have looked at every single patient as being a phenomenal new experience,” says Smith, using Rastegar’s words and his Farsi accent. “Excited to walk in that room. Oh yeah, oh yeah, no question about it. Phenomenally excited. Every time, every time, every time.”

Moments later, Smith portrays another doctor, Forrester A. Lee Jr., M.D. ’79, HS ’83, a cardiologist and the school’s assistant dean for multicultural affairs, who calmly and deliberately describes how medical training itself can block vital avenues of communication. “When you’re listening to a patient tell you things that you have to integrate into a whole body of knowledge you have, it’s hard to listen well, because your mind is trying to filter out what they’re saying. And consider alternate diagnoses and so forth. So you’re really not listening; you’re trying to solve the puzzle … and so it just sort of goes by you that they said something very, very important. You didn’t hear it.”

Sitting down in a chair, Smith becomes a patient, speaking with a trace of a Southern accent. She is Frankie Harris, a woman with HIV who has been treated at Yale.

“I didn’t trust anyone. Doctors wasn’t listening. I had to fight, I had to advocate for myself to get doctors to listen to me. I had to learn to say, ‘What’s the side effects of this?’ Learn to say ‘No, I’m not takin’ that, give it to someone else, let someone else try it first.’ … I am very conscious and very responsible for other people’s health when it comes to my virus. And I says [to the doctor] ‘Look, before you examine me put some gloves on. I have the virus.’ She went out of the room and she never came back. She never came back.”

The physicians who crowded into Fitkin for medical grand rounds in mid-November had not come to hear a colleague discussing a disease but rather to watch an outsider make a case for the potential richness of doctor-patient communication. Playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith used the words of physicians and patients from the Yale community to create Rounding It Out, a 90-minute examination of how doctors and patients view one another.

(Read the entire article here.)

New beginnings abound at ZACH Theatre this week — for both the Austin theatre scene and its latest star Anna Deavere Smith. Ms. Smith begins preview performances of her masterful new play LET ME DOWN EASY on Wednesday at 8pm on ZACH’s Whisenhunt Stage, and begins the play’s official run with a champagne reception following Saturday’s opening night performance.

Beginning, too, at ZACH is an item that recently caught the attention of The New York Times: the start of a long-anticipated collaboration between famed Broadway director Leonard Foglia and Ms. Smith. The two are debuting their collaborative work on LET ME DOWN EASY exclusively at ZACH Theatre.

And, if you ask us, this is a match made in theatre heaven! LET ME DOWN EASY is on its final stop before heading to New York’s Second Stage Theater. But Austin audiences get to witness a level of closeness with Anna Deavere Smith that New York audiences just won’t see. Because ZACH’s Whisenhunt stage hosts Ms. Smith’s play in-the-round, Austin audiences will have a chance to see her in a setting with unparalleled intimacy.

“The city of Austin and ZACH Theatre, specifically, have played an important role in the evolution of this project,” said Ms. Smith. “ZACH Theatre has been part of the play since the beginning; many of the characters – from Gov. Ann Richards to Lance Armstrong – originated in suggestions from people at ZACH.”

The fact that the collaboration between Leonard Foglia and Anna Deavere Smith begins at ZACH Theatre is also a tremendous privilege for Austin audiences. Mr. Foglia took Laurence Fishborne’s one-man play THURGOOD to extreme critical acclaim last year on Broadway. And many critics are excited to see what role he will play in shaping Ms. Smith’s one-woman show at ZACH.

LET ME DOWN EASY “is a substantial revision of what I did before, focusing far more on health care than the previous productions,” Ms. Smith told The New York Times. “Signs seem to suggest we will soon be in a vigorous national debate over health care. The piece not only looks at the human body as both resilient and vulnerable, but also health care as a practical part of that.”

For tickets, call (512) 476-0541, x1. Book early, shows are selling fast! Because of the tremendous demand, ZACH recently added a Tuesday night performance, and the theatre is offering a limited number of $20 tickets on Tuesday nights.

This project has been made possible by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation.

This won’t last long.

ZACH Theatre is offering a special promotional rate for Anna Deavere Smith’s first Wednesday and Sunday evening performances of her new play LET ME DOWN EASY. For 8pm performances on Wednesday, April 15 and Sunday, April 19 only, ZACH will take $10 off all tickets purchased by phone (512-476-0541, x1), until the shows sell out.

This is Ms. Smith’s last stop before heading to New York, and we anticipate sold out crowds every night during her short run in Austin.

LET ME DOWN EASY is an Austin-borne play that started 8 years ago right here at ZACH. This is a rare opportunity for Austin audiences to experience such a high caliber performance by film and television star Anna Deavere Smith.

Directed by Broadway’s Leonard Foglia, and made possible by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, Ms. Smith incorporates a dramatic range of interview subjects during this passionate, utterly jaw-dropping performance. It is a masterful documentary style staging of real-life interviews of influential and important figures — ranging from Texas Governor Ann Richards to Lance Armstrong, Eve Ensler, Anderson Cooper and survivors of the Rwandan Genocide — as Ms. Smith channels their compelling perspectives on issues from healthcare and education to international politics and the economy.

Dave Steakley, ZACH’s Artistic Director, notes, “Ms. Smith possesses the amazing ability to change from one character to another — swiftly, completely and stunningly. Through her full transformation, right before our eyes, we find ourselves equipped with the tools to create personal change for ourselves.”

This is a performance like nothing you’ve ever seen before. You are at once watching Ms. Smith deliver the performance of her lifetime and getting a rare opportunity to meet some of the most significant athletes, physicians and players in the global health crisis.

Don’t miss it. It all starts Weds., April 15 — and, remember, ZACH is running a promotion of $10 off tickets for evening (8pm) performances on its first night in preview (4/15) and the first Sunday, April 19. But the offer is on a first-come, first-served basis by phone only, at (512) 476-0541, x1.

Photos by Michael Lutch, courtesy of American Repertory Theatre