LET ME DOWN EASY Stuns Austin Audiences: A Defining Performance for Anna Deavere Smith

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.