Carol Lloyd

This is one explanation for the fervor with which Anna Deavere Smith has been received. Of all the likely candidates — playwrights like Kushner, directors like Peter Sellars, performance artists like Spalding Gray — none has come closer to fulfilling that fantasy of theatrical messiah. In 1991, she seized the American stage with “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and other Identities,” her one-woman epic on the bloody Jewish-black confrontation that shook New York after a 7-year-old black boy was hit and killed by a Hasidic driver. Although she had been working on her brand of documentary theater since the early 1980s, and had won the enthusiastic response of critics, “Fires” thrust her into the national limelight in a way that nobody could have expected. With her sweeping political and artistic ambitions and her uncanny talent for mimicry, Smith was greeted as theater’s antidote against social irrelevance. Not only did she make work that reflected the broad canvas of America, but she did so without the use of massive casts, tendentious dialogue and high-art pretense. Not only was she an African-American woman, she was talking about racial issues freed from the blinders of identity politics. Not only was she a serious experimenter in the field of theater, but she was — of all things — entertaining.

Theater, in Smith’s hands, would become nothing less than an attempt to reintroduce America to itself, giving voice to the disparate social groups that had become warring tribes. “Early on in my work, I wanted to use my body as the evidence that a human being can take on the identity of another,” Smith told a gathering of business and arts leaders in Seattle this year. “I think we all have immense potential for compassion as individuals. But that gets stopped when we take on fixed positions.”

In portraying real people from divergent backgrounds, Smith depicts the hot pot of American culture that refuses to melt. Her technique is so seemingly simple that it is a wonder more actors-turned-solo-performers have not followed in her footsteps. She interviews individuals who have been directly or indirectly involved in an American crisis or turning point, memorizes their words, then reproduces these finely honed mimicries onstage. A smattering of props and costume changes, a video clip or two, some lighting and voila: a theatrical form that capitalizes on two American obsessions — the personal revelation and the cultural clash — but elevates them to a subtle study of human nature.

In some ways, Smith’s work is the ultimate expression of the autobiographical fever gripping the nation. Like Oprah Winfrey and Ricki Lake, she cobbles her shows together from real people’s heartfelt revelations. “Acting isn’t nice,” she has said, asserting that it’s not her work to paint flattering pictures. “It’s giving but it’s also stealing.” Smith, a light-skinned African-American woman, becomes an old Jewish man, a Korean grocer, a black minister and a Hollywood agent, expropriating their speech rhythms and tics, and drilling down to the essence of their character. George C. Wolfe, who has directed two of Smith’s productions, called her a “ferret,” explaining that she’s “unwilling to accept (her subjects’) external explanations.”

But Smith herself is invisible in her work. Like most documentarians, she attempts to inhabit her subjects’ lives — interviewing, editing and splicing together their stories — but stays silent about her own point of view. Unlike Spalding Gray, whose every bout of existential flatulence is tenderly chronicled in book and performance form, Smith guards her personal life fiercely and dislikes probing or personal interviews. A single woman of 48 who has been romantically linked with other women in the theater, she has said in interviews that she simply doesn’t have time for a personal life. By all accounts, Smith is a deeply private woman who works nonstop in shaping and giving voice to the intimate expressions of others.

Smith’s reticence was evident from the very beginning. Her mother was in labor for five days: “I came down the birth canal, turned around and went back up,” she once explained. The oldest of five in a Baltimore family, Smith was a shy child whose remarkable penchant for mimicry saved her from being a social outcast. In 1967, she attended Beaver College, a small women’s school outside Philadelphia, where she studied acting. But coming of age during the era of black power and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. threw her into an identity crisis. She went, in her words, from “a nice Negro girl” to a young woman who “had no idea who [she] was or [what] she should be.” In the 1970s she set out for California with $80 and an overnight bag in search of a social movement to join. But by then the fires of revolution were already dying and Smith found herself taking acting classes at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. “I guess if my college was courting, I met my lover in my first summer of acting school,” she once said. “If you ask about the birth of my artistry, I got pregnant with acting that first year.”

After studying and performing in San Francisco, Smith moved to New York, where she won small parts in off-Broadway productions and soap operas. Soon she began teaching acting at Yale, NYU and Carnegie Mellon. It was there in the halls of academe that she began developing the technique that would transform her from a relatively unknown actor to one of the most celebrated artists of her time. It is not exactly an acting technique — though often that’s how she refers to it — but a linguistic philosophy. “Character lives in language,” she says, pointing to something her grandfather once told her: “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” And so by committing the language of Americans to memory, she searches for their true selves lurking between the stuttering and the slang and the peculiarities of speech.

In the early ’80s Smith embarked on the first of a series of documentary shows she called “On the Road: A Search of American Character” — which all her subsequent shows have been a part of. When she began interviewing subjects in preparation for her first show, Smith sought ways to compel people to speak more authentically. “I asked a linguist how I might encourage people to say ‘uh’ more. ‘Uhs’ are actually the place where I find American character.” The linguist suggested that she ask people three questions: Have you ever been accused of something you did not do? Can you recall the circumstances of your birth? Have you ever come close to death?

Why would a woman so finely trained in the art of communication need a linguist to furnish her with such simple and human questions? Although she now ventures into the streets, the boardrooms and the living rooms of America, Smith’s early work grew directly out of the precious academic and artistic ghettos where she herself lived. The title of her show “Chlorophyll Postmodernism and the Mother Goddess/A Conversation,” performed in 1988 in San Diego, says it all. It is a compilation of none-too-gripping interviews with members of a women’s stage project about the evolution of an explicitly feminist theater during the 1970s. Two years later at Eureka Theater in San Francisco, she performed “On the Road: San Francisco 1990,” a vast improvement over “Chlorophyll Postmodernism” but still a meandering assortment of voices in search of a compelling story. She hadn’t yet discovered how to apply her techniques to stories big enough for her voice.

“Fires” sparked Smith’s artistic and commercial breakthrough. In 1993 PBS televised “Fires” on “American Playhouse.” A year later she followed the Crown Heights model and presented “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” in which she portrayed an assortment of Angelenos touched by the Rodney King riots. With her elastic face and acrobatic voice, she transmogrified before our eyes, crossing over race, age, class and gender lines without so much as a makeup change. She portrayed a white Hollywood talent agent who hid out in the Beverly Hills Hotel, a Korean grocer who protected his shop with a gun from his rooftop, police Chief Daryl Gates explaining his reasons for staying at a socialite fund-raiser as the city burned and Twilight Bey, a former gang member who brokered the tenuous truce between warring South Central groups. This was the human history missing from the babble of 24-hour news, the idiosyncratic voices of our most modern megalopolis.

Now Smith splits her time between teaching acting at Stanford University — she lives in San Francisco — and working on “House Arrest,” a play about the myth of the American presidency from the Jefferson-Hemings controversy to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “House Arrest,” her first multi-actor play, will premiere this spring at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In preparing her latest play, Smith moved within Washington’s elite political and media circles, provoking barbs from the likes of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who chided her for riding on Air Force One with President Clinton, courtesy of a Newsweek press pass.

Smith is no longer the obscure actor and academic in search of America’s voices. In recent years, she has been showered with professional and academic awards and appointments, including a 1996 “genius grant” of $280,000 from the MacArthur Foundation, an Obie Award and the Ford Foundation’s first artist in residency. Last summer she began a three-year stint as founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, a new Harvard University think tank devoted to socially conscious art that in part grew from conversations with her friend Henry Louis Gates, head of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

Smith’s growing celebrity has left some of her old theatrical comrades watching from a distance and shaking their heads. “She’s been bitten by the fame bug,” one former associate said. “She’s moved away from her old community of theater people and burned a lot of bridges.” Some spread rumors that she travels everywhere in a limousine with a personal masseuse; others point to the number of assistants, directors and others she has fired over the years and speculate that she’s become impossible to work for. “She had assistants who she refused to speak to but still expected them to get their job done,” one former colleague said.

These grumblings raise the question of whether Anna Deavere Smith has become so successful she can no longer serve as the country’s cross-cultural ambassador, slipping unobtrusively across our many fracture lines. While she still can portray all the world onstage, once she steps off the boards she moves in rarefied circles. She is part of the cultural elite now — lunching with Alice Waters, brainstorming at Harvard and the Ford Foundation, chatting backstage with President Clinton. Her new status opens doors, certainly, but it also closes them. Television versions of her performances — like that of “Fires” and another under way based on “Twilight” — have made her accessible to a wider audience. But what of her vision for making theater relevant again, for making it speak to more than just the usual crowd of comfortable and sensitive patrons. “In my naiveness,” she once told the Boston Globe, “I thought if I brought different kinds of people (in front of) the audience, that would ensure that there were different kinds of people in the audience, but that hasn’t happened.”

After sharing a verboten drink with other KBR employees, she says she blacked out, then woke up covered with feces and blood next to an unconscious U.S. soldier. Of the events that transpired the night before, she recalls very little: screaming when the soldier was sodomizing her, a KBR employee holding her hand, but instead of helping her, forcing his penis in her mouth. Since she only had one drink and she gave it to someone to hold while she stepped outside, she assumes her drink was drugged.

Ugly, but not altogether unusual. But what happened since her assault seems to be a special kind of mistreatment that U.S. military contractors are perfecting to an art: bureaucratic rape.

She claims she was told to keep quiet about the incident and she did, continuing to work on the base. Eventually, she spoke to the employee assistant at a larger base and filed a formal report — and after a series of interviews with KBR, she says she was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement. A military doctor she visited and confided in also reported the incident to the CID, military crime investigators. Since one of the assailants was a member of the military, it could become a military case, but the CID won’t be able to prosecute any KBR employees involved. When Leamon engaged an American lawyer via e-mail, she claims her computer was confiscated as “evidence,” effectively cutting her off from the outside world.

Since reporting the case, Leamon (again like Jones) has found herself in a legal limbo. The crimes happened off American soil so American criminal courts can claim no jurisdiction. The Iraqi court system — according to Paul Bremer’s Order 17 — is not allowed to prosecute cases against American military contractors.

As with Jones, KBR has pressed for the matter to be resolved through “arbitration.” Currently, Jones is waiting for a judge to decide whether her lawsuit against Halliburton (the parent company of KBR at the time of her assault) can go to court or must go into arbitration. Get that? A civil suit is the best she can hope for! Jones told “Democracy Now” that she’s started a foundation for other women who have been sexually assaulted by contractors in Iraq, and she claims 40 women have approached her with their stories.

On Wednesday, both women testified before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, and the Justice Department, according to an AP story, assured the senators the agency took allegations of sexual assault “very seriously.” This amounts to a modicum of progress. When the Senate held similar hearings in December, the Justice Department didn’t even bother sending a representative. But still.

The idea that there’s a place somewhat under American control where a rape or a murder is unprosecutable (and can only be resolved as a workplace dispute) beggars the mind. This legal limbo theory lets the Justice Department quite off the hook. According to Sen. Bill Nelson, who chaired the hearings, there are at least three laws that give the Justice Department the authority to take on these cases. What’s more, the agency claims to be investigating Leamon’s case along with several others. The question is whether they’ll do their job.

Take a stab at how many violent criminal cases against a U.S. contractor the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted since the war began? If you guessed more than zero, you guessed too many.

So when a CBC article subtitled “The Rise of Alternative Fashion Models” landed in my in box, I couldn’t help wondering: Is this for real? And it is — there is a new breed of diverse body-typed, tattooed and even transsexual models walking the runway. The problem is that they aren’t doing it in New York or Milan, Italy, but in the explicitly antiestablishment event Toronto Alternative Arts and Fashion Week (known by the mixed-up acronym FAT), which began April 9.

AS CBC sums it up: “The event prides itself on celebrating men and women of all shapes and sizes but also embraces ethnic variety and body art. [FAT] models stand anywhere from five-foot-one to six-foot-one; tattoos are flaunted, not concealed; belly flab is accentuated, not spurned.”

What’s not to love? If it came to my city, I’d bare my belly flab and go.

What’s interesting is that the producers claim their inclusive aesthetic isn’t simply healthier for the models but potentially more profitable for the designers. One organizer says designers who continue to hire the same old scrawny white chicks fail to realize “unleashed potential, newfound profit, newfound economic and financial potential that they haven’t yet achieved.” (We’re talkin’ mega newfound potential.)

Does that mean that your average middle-aged, slightly overweight mother of three can finally break into modeling? Not quite. But the article focuses on one particularly promising model — a Kenyan transsexual male-to-female — whose tall, narrow frame looks like a lot of female models everywhere. And after looking at dozens of photos from past years, where you’d be hard-pressed to pinch an inch, it’s obvious to me that the fashion world will sooner embrace transsexual models before pudgy ones.

As one of the organizers admits: “The images still have to be aspirational. You still want that glamour. You don’t want the photograph to look like a driver’s license picture.”

Despite a couple of near misses when the Colombian government and the rebels appeared near to an agreement to exchange captives for prisoners, and when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez negotiated the release of a handful of captives last year, Betancourt’s prospects have seemed bleak. In November the government found videotapes of Betancourt and other hostages that suggested that the captives were still alive, but in the soundless video footage she appeared extremely gaunt and did not look at the camera.

Recent news (via the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times, among others): After six years in captivity in the jungle the 46-year-old Betancourt is rumored to be on the verge of death. A priest from a village near FARC-occupied land claimed that she had been taken to the local clinic for medical care, though the doctor and the nurse there have denied they treated Betancourt. A medical mission sent by French President Nicolas Sarkozy landed in Colombia on Thursday, hoping to offer Betancourt medical care. But the most recent report from Reuters claims that the mission remains grounded in Bogota. “Are we pessimistic about a result from this French mission? Yes,” Astrid Betancourt, Ingrid’s sister, told the local media.

At this point it’s impossible to know what will become of Betancourt, but as a progressive politician who has risked her life for her ideals, she merits more column inches than all the bad girls in Hollywood combined. For a great glimpse of her fierce resolve, check out this Salon interview, just a couple of weeks before her abduction, and for a documentary film shot during the years before and after her kidnapping, go here.

Thursday Air America Radio announced that Rhodes had been suspended because of the comments, so good for it. Yet such suspensions won’t offer but a drop in the bucket against our wasteland of media vitriol. Forget sex and violence; I think playground cruelty is the source of the most obscenity. Have you seen the outdoor ad campaign for the new romantic comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”? The black-and-white billboards proclaim: “I’m So Over You, Sarah Marshall,” “You Suck Sarah Marshall,” “My Mother Always Hated You, Sarah Marshall,” and “You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall.” It’s the first time I’ve wanted to shield my daughter’s eyes from a spectacle in the city.

Ironically, the person who has been most articulate about the current mean streak in American culture is Barack Obama, Rhodes’ apparent favorite. But as someone who also favors the senator from Illinois, I’ve become increasingly queasy about the tone some of his supporters are willing to take. At a recent brunch, I heard a sweet elderly woman wearing an Obama button talk about “just hating” Hillary Clinton. She had no idea who her fellow partygoers were voting for.

As ad hominem insult has become normative political speech, professional bloviators like Rhodes seem to have to go farther each day to retain their “edge.” Still, why does Rhodes need to be so misogynist when she’s carving up her victims with her tongue?

Very well. Since there is apparently some folklore that advises pregnant women against wearing seat belts (strikes me as patently absurd), there’s no harm in a scientific study proving the obvious: Seat belts save lives. Not just “regular people” but pregnant women with big vulnerable bellies.

But the angle of the article — the saving of 200 fetuses a year, a rather small number given the approximate 43,000 automobile deaths in the United States every year — seems kinda insidious. (In case you missed it, Oklahoma passed legislation this week that allows healthcare workers to refuse to perform abortions and requires abortion providers to do ultrasounds of all pregnant women seeking abortions, along with another bill that makes it a felony to assault a pregnant woman and cause a miscarriage.)

Would I be devastated to lose a pregnancy in an automobile accident? Of course. But with headlines focused on saving fetuses (not their mothers) combined with new laws and Horton hearing every creature however small, it seems there’s a not-so-silent march toward endowing fetuses with personhood.