On screen she is the woman who runs the department, says no and turns out to be right; the work that made her name is on stage, where she speaks other people's words in their own rhythms. The screen has used her carefully and never fully.
Fi1m perspective
Anna Deavere Smith plays the person whose job is to say no. In Nurse Jackie (2009) her Gloria Akalitus is introduced as a hospital bureaucrat to be outwitted, the obstacle between Edie Falco's nurse and whatever Jackie wants that week, and the series gradually allows her to be right. In The West Wing (2000–06) she was Nancy McNally, the national security adviser, a recurring part across six seasons. Writers reach for her when they need an authority who will not be charmed, and she gives them one without raising her voice.
That is a narrow use of a wide talent, and the talent is mostly to be found elsewhere. Since the early 1980s Smith has built a body of theatre out of interviews: she talks to people around a crisis, then performs their words, their speech rhythms and their gestures, one after another, alone on a stage. Fires in the Mirror (1992), on the Crown Heights riots, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), on the Los Angeles riots, made her name. She does not vanish into these people; she stays visibly herself and lets their sentences do the changing. "I don’t become anybody. People say that. I think of it as trying to make a jump. I call it the broad jump towards the other."
The film work sits alongside this rather than growing out of it. Jonathan Demme cast her three times, in Philadelphia (1993), The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and Rachel Getting Married (2008), where she is Carol, one face in a wedding party we admired as a whole without stopping on her. There were also Dave (1993) and The American President (1995), more Washington rooms. None of these parts is built around her. She fills them well and the camera moves on. The usual complaint about her screen career is that the roles are functional, and we think that is a complaint about the people doing the casting.
Somewhere in the long middle of Nurse Jackie, when the show was circling the same ground, we realised Akalitus had become the person in the building we trusted, and we could not point to the scene where it had happened. That is the stage listener at work: she had been listening all along while everyone else talked. If you want to see what she can do, her own shows are the place, and some have been filmed: Notes from the Field (2016), on the school-to-prison pipeline, reached the screen in 2018, and Let Me Down Easy (2008), on the body and the health system, was broadcast too. The films give you an administrator. Her own stage gives you a few dozen people, all of them her.
Biography
Anna Deavere Smith (born 18 September 1950) is an American actress, playwright and professor. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and trained at Arcadia University, where she earned a BA, and at the American Conservatory Theater, where she received an MFA.
She is known for her one-woman documentary theatre works, including Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993). On screen she has appeared in films such as Philadelphia (1993), Dave (1993), The American President (1995), Rachel Getting Married (2008) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and in television series including The West Wing (2000–2006) and Nurse Jackie (2009–2015). She is a tenured professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of its Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.
