Is theater dead? For centuries critics have debated this oddly self-prophesying question. But now that movies and electronic entertainment have laid claim to every corner of the public's imagination, never before has the pulse of that non-virtual animal seemed more faint. In recent decades valiant thespians have meandered into unknown territory in search of a cure. Performance artists resuscitated autobiographical storytelling; spoken word artists breathed hot air into the oral poem; multimedia artists spliced high-tech inventions with pagan rituals. Occasionally, a discovery would be made, like playwright Tony Kushner, whose seven-hour play "Angels in America" swept the Tonys and the Pulitzers, or director Robert Wilson, whose visual, elliptical parables dazzled a generation of anti-verbal theater artists. But many of the experimental treatments only made poor old Dionysus all the sicker. Contemporary theater addressed fewer and fewer people about increasingly myopic topics. Spiritual redemption -- as if death had already occurred -- became the thematic order of the day. The private lives of solo performers became the standard source of new material. Theater needed not just another infusion of talent. It needed a savior.

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.

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