Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education

‘I’ve been interested in people who see the dignity in struggle’

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Anna Deavere Smith is a riveting veteran stage educator. Her latest and equally timely original theater text “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education”— seamlessly directed by Leonard Foglia at American Repertory Theatre—not only ranges as before back and forth between participants and observers in a documentary-like piece but also includes an intriguing interactive 25-minute middle section calling on audience members to listen to and teach each other through questions, answers and comments.

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In “Notes from the Field,” Smith has created a stunningly nuanced, inventive, and emotionally resonant investigation of how the country values the lives of young people of color.

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Smith transitions gracefully and convincingly between characters, with enough humor mixed in to keep the material from pushing the audience to despondency.

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This is an important piece of political theatre, well played and directed that has a great deal to say about the problems caused by unequal education. It is thought provoking, engrossing, and entertaining.

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Once again she unpacks some of the most unpleasant realities of American life, ones we would rather not face—racism, inequality, educational failure, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, the tragic waste of human lives. In this extraordinary telling, these issues are exposed as a complex nest of interrelated problems.

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About midway through the first act of “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education” – Anna Deavere Smith’s emotionally stunning, outrage-inspiring but ultimately hopeful one-woman theatrical performance on the devastating societal effects of the school-to-prison pipeline – I found myself wondering how an audience that was not primarily composed of “serious” theatergoers (in Cambridge, no less) would have received the impactful material.

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From the classrooms to the streets, from the glorious memories of Selma to shocking cellphone video that captures a school officer tossing a student around a classroom, here’s the raw stuff of actual and urgent crisis.

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Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education is so much more than a “One Woman Show.” 

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The overall effect of this play is stunning and deeply moving – moving one to tears at an emotional level and moving each individual to want to find a way to make a difference.

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Marshalling her considerable creative forces and once again singlehandedly conjuring a wildly diverse array of characters, Anna Deavere Smith schools us from the front lines of education vs.race in these not yet United States.

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Theater needs an audience to fulfill its mission, to engage with the entertainment being produced on the stage.

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“Notes from the Field” homes in on what some call the school-to-prison pipeline: the syndrome in which poor, usually minority youths are disproportionately punished, even in pre-school, then shunted into the juvenile justice system and often into a lifetime of ins and outs at the Big House.

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A superbly conceived and delivered, and very moving, inquiry into racism, schools and incarceration.

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That said, Smith’s performance is majestic. As in her other solo shows, she uses her body and voice as instruments of transformation, segueing from a preacher to a school official with the ease of a chameleon.

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When you listen to Anna Deavere Smith, you don’t just hear Anna Deavere Smith. The renowned playwright and actor builds her scripts from transcribed interviews with dozens of real people.

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The school-to-prison pipeline. A country’s complex relationship with law enforcement. An educational system that too often deserves an “F.” These may be the lead topics from this morning’s talk shows and the headlines from today’s newspapers, but they’re also the recurring themes in Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.

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What if the talkback were truly part of the show itself, and not an epilogue? That’s the model Anna Deavere Smith works with in “Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education,” a show that the actress/theater-maker seems to view more as an exercise in citizenship than simple, sit-and-applaud entertainment.

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Actress, playwright, and teacher Anna Deavere Smith—as well known for her work on camera (Nurse Jackie, The West Wing) as she is for her searing, docu-style plays (Let Me Down Easy, Twilight: Los Angeles)—is bringing her latest experiment to the American Repertory Theater.

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Anna Deavere Smith talks about her latest one woman show.

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While no one on the campaign trail has yet to take on education and our incarceration crisis in a substantive way, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has. 

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Writer, performer and professor Anna Deavere Smith says the U.S. is on the verge of a new civil rights movement. And, she says, the theater might help get people involved.

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Notes From the Field is a heartbreaking examination of race and the criminal justice system from the award-winning actress and playwright​.

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The Takeaway speaks with Anna Deavere Smith about race and America. Smith says coming together is what’s most necessary in these moments of pain.

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