Notes From the Field

by Anna Deavere Smith

  Praise for Anna Deavere Smith’s

  NOTES FROM THE FIELD

  “Devastating….Astonishing….Unquestionably great theater.”

  —Vulture

  “Brilliant….Anna Deavere Smith may be the most empathetic person in America.” —HuffPost

  “[A] masterpiece….Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope.” —The Village Voice

  “Urgently timely….Audacious and mind-opening.”

  —Time Out New York

  “This is captivating political theatre, a devastating document of racial inequality and the most rousing of rallying calls. Everyone should watch it.” —The Guardian

  “A tour de force….A coruscating indictment of the school-to-prison pipeline.” —Financial Times

  “Stirring….Powerful….The scope is almost Shakespearean: the voices range from policy professionals to people on the street. If there’s an overarching thrust…it lies in the suggestion that the struggle for civil rights is ongoing: the legacy of segregation, its trauma too, endures and reasserts itself.”

  —The Telegraph (London)

  Anna Deavere Smith

  NOTES FROM THE FIELD

  Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, teacher, and playwright and the creator of the acclaimed On the Road series of one-woman plays, which are based on her interviews with diverse voices from communities in crisis. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President Obama and two Obie Awards, her work has also been nominated for a Pulitzer and two Tonys. Onscreen, she has appeared in many films and television shows, including Philadelphia, The West Wing, Black-ish, and Nurse Jackie. She is University Professor in the department of Art & Public Policy at NYU, where she also directs the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  ALSO BY ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

  Letters to a Young Artist

  House Arrest and Piano

  Talk to Me

  Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

  Fires in the Mirror

  Copyright © 2019 by Pearl B. Young, Inc.

  “About the Music” copyright © 2019 by Marcus Shelby

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The James Baldwin Estate: Adapted from James Baldwin’s text in Rap on Race by James Baldwin and Margaret Meade, copyright © 1971 and copyright renewed. Reprinted by arrangement with The James Baldwin Estate.

  Amaru Entertainment, Inc., successor-in-interest to the estate of Tupac Shakur: Excerpt from “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” from The Rose That Grew from Concrete by Tupac Shakur, copyright ©1989 by Amaru Entertainment, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Amaru Entertainment, Inc., successor-in-interest to the estate of Tupac Shakur.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Cover Art © 2018 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. HBO® is a service mark of Home Box Office, Inc.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Smith, Anna Deavere, author.

  Title: Notes from the field / by Anna Deavere Smith.

  Description: New York : Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019. | “An Anchor Books original.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018040656 (print) | LCCN 2018051227 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Minority students—United States—Drama. | Monologues, American. | United States—Race relations—Drama.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.M465 N68 2019 | DDC 812/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018040656

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525564591

  Ebook ISBN 9780525564607

  Cover design by Adalis Martinez

  Cover image © 2018 Home Box Office, Inc.

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v5.4

  ep

  In Memory of

  Anna Young Smith,

  Dr. Maxine Greene,

  and Mr. Jonathan Demme

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Anna Deavere Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Production Notes

  Epigraph

  Act One

  Prologue: Sherrilyn Ifill

  The Death of Freddie Gray

  Kevin Moore

  Allen Bullock

  Jamal Harrison Bryant

  The Rose in Concrete

  Michael Tubbs

  On the River

  Taos Proctor

  Judge Abby Abinanti

  Education and Survival

  Leticia De Santiago

  Tony Eady

  The Shakara Story

  Amanda Ripley

  Niya Kenny

  Act Two

  A Candle in the Village

  Sari Muhonen

  Denise Dodson

  Trauma

  Dr. Victor Carrion, MD

  Steven Campos

  Stephanie Williams

  Never Give Up

  James Baldwin

  Sherrilyn Ifill

  Bryan Stevenson

  Bree Newsome

  Congressman John Lewis

  About the Music

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  Notes from the Field is the most recent installment in what I consider my life’s work: a series of plays I call On the Road: A Search for American Character. Since the 1980s, I have periodically traveled around America, interviewing large numbers of people, collecting their words and performing them onstage, crafting them into multivoiced solo dramas that bear witness to particular historical moments. I’ve created about twenty of these pieces over the past four decades, including Fires in the Mirror (in response to the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (about the riots). Notes from the Field, my latest effort, concerns what has come to be known among social scientists, educators, jurists, politicians, and activists as “the school-to-prison pipeline.”

  I view my plays as documentations of moments in history. Central to my creative process is active listening. My goal is to pay careful attention to the people I interview and then to reflect back what I have heard in the hope of sparking a conversation, of making change possible. I aim not to merely imitate but to study people closely enough so that I can embody them on the stage, using my own voice and body. When I was a girl, my grandfather told me, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.” People speak of putting themselves into other people’s shoes. My way of doing that is to put myself into other people’s words.

  It all starts with listening.

  My process in creating Notes from the Field was the same one that I have used across my career. I interviewed about 250 people for this play, in four different
geographic regions: Maryland, South Carolina, Northern California, and Pennsylvania. From out of the wealth of interview material that I amassed using the rehearsal processes for five different productions and some staged readings, I chose nineteen people to perform. The voices I selected reflect the variety of people caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline: students, parents, counselors, administrators, prisoners, preachers, politicians. Among them are Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Reverend Jamal Harrison Bryant, who spoke at the funeral of Freddie Gray; Bree Newsome, a young activist arrested for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House; and Niya Kenny, a high school student who was arrested for protesting the violent treatment of a classmate by a school police officer. I end the play with Congressman John Lewis because he personifies both a violent moment in American history—the civil rights movement—and the promise of what American character is all about.

  While the script of Notes from the Field was still a work in progress, I performed it in workshops around the country. I tried out different versions in different places, engaging local communities in a series of exchanges that helped to shape the piece.

  The project really started as a social justice project. Each night in Berkeley, California, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and subsequently at the American Repertory Theater housed at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I literally stopped the show in the middle and told the audience they were “the second act” of the play. It was an enormous undertaking. We trained facilitators and divided audiences of five hundred people into groups of twenty. We then sent them around the theater, into spaces that they would normally not inhabit—paint shops and the artistic director’s office—and spaces they do inhabit, like lobbies, front lawns, and bar-restaurant areas. I was trying to use the convening power of the theater to get strangers talking to one another about education, about race relations, about inequality, about violence, about what they as individuals could do. We asked people to say how proximate they were to the problem.

  Nonprofit and for-profit US theater audiences are composed, for the most part, of middle-aged and middle- and upper-middle-class individuals—subscribers. At the same time, we were able to gather audiences of people from various communities at the American Repertory Theater, thanks in part to the support of Harvard’s then president Drew Faust. One night the athletic teams came. Attendance was required for all freshmen.

  Every night we performed at Berkeley and at the American Repertory Theater, we chose a person from the community—a restauranteur, a police officer, a student, an ex-offender, a religious leader—to welcome the audience and to say why they had come. This, to me, exemplifies what artistic institutions can be in their communities—places where a radical welcome is extended, where a radical hospitality is offered. We need spaces to bring us out into civic space, beyond our comfort zones, out from behind our metaphoric gates and picket fences, away for a moment from the TV, laptop, and smartphone screens that project back to us what we choose to see and hear.

  My goal in all of this? To inspire action. To suggest to the youngest person in the crowd that they have agency. And we recently saw evidence of this. We saw in the US a movement among high school students sparked by the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. One scholar of American education, Pedro Noguera, whom I at one time portrayed in Notes from the Field, predicted when I interviewed him in 2015 that activism would be more likely to happen in high school than in colleges due to the cost of attaining a college education and the pressures on college students.

  In its final theatrical form, Notes from the Field was staged off-Broadway in New York City in 2016. It was subsequently adapted into a feature film by HBO that released in 2018. The text of this book combines the scripts of two of the stage productions while also bringing in elements from the HBO film.

  It is my hope that the film can reach a wider audience—including young people, teachers, police officers, and others who don’t typically go to the theater—and that it can usefully contribute to an ongoing debate. Since I first began working on this project, the issues have taken on an even greater urgency.

  I vividly remember the exact moment that led me to this subject. It was an incident that occurred while I was filming the television series Nurse Jackie. I was in hair and makeup next to a castmate, British actress Eve Best, and I told her I couldn’t get out of my mind a news story I had just heard: that a kid in Baltimore, my hometown, had peed in a water cooler at school and they were going to send him to jail. Eve responded, in her fabulous accent, “Oh, well, whatever happened to mischief?”

  That was when it struck me: rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated. Data released by the US Department of Justice during the Obama administration revealed the overuse of expulsions and suspensions to discipline kids who live in poverty. Black, brown, Native American, and poor white children not only get suspended and expelled more often than middle-class or rich kids; they are also disciplined more harshly from kindergarten onward, and the police are called in more frequently. Incredibly, even five-year-olds have been handcuffed for having tantrums in school.

  In the summer of 2018, I performed Notes from the Field at the Royal Court Theatre in London. There I learned that this is not only a US problem. Students in London are using what is called subvertising—that is, sending political messages in forms that resemble ads from well-known brands, such as posters in the London Undergound—to bring attention to the issue there. The ads ask for more financial support and more compassionate disciplinary practices. As in the US, a study at the University of Edinburgh revealed that, in the UK, students excluded from school by age twelve are four times more likely to be incarcerated as adults.

  We are failing to meet the needs of our most vulnerable and troubled children. And this is a choice. Our policy choices as a society and our decisions about where to allocate resources—pouring them into prisons rather than into mental health or education—have turned our schools into a road to incarceration for too many of our youth. Because this is not only an American issue, we have an opportunity to invite new ideas, new ways of thinking about the disenfranchised.

  In some ways, the current political climate is discouraging, but in other ways, I see room for hope. There is certainly a greater awareness now of these social injustices—and of the ability of ordinary people to do something about them. Some of the individuals represented in this play stand as an inspiring testament to that hope.

  This is a time for people to cease being spectators and to instead be moved to get out there and do something to effect change. It is time to ask ourselves, “Who are we? What do we believe in? What kind of country do we want to be?”

  I believe that art can inspire action. It can motivate us to reimagine a world where schools are more than sorting mechanisms for the haves and the have-nots, where they can function as centers for a culture of learning in which teachers, staff, administrators, parents, and students from all communities are respected and nurtured intellectually, physically, and creatively.

  But that is a type of reimagining that needs to include all kinds of voices, especially those that have been historically discounted. It is a reimagining that requires courage, empathy, and action. And it has to start with listening.

  PRODUCTION NOTES

  Casting and Approach

  This work was performed as a one-person show as a part of the author’s ongoing On the Road: A Search for American Character series.

  The objective of the On the Road series, in which this work is approximately the nineteenth play, is to absorb America “word for word” in the spirit of the nation’s “more perfect union” objective.

  The play can be performed with any number of actors. It is the author’s intention that actors would portray characters outside of their own race, gender, age, and “type” within a diverse
company of actors. Depending on available resources, this may or may not be possible or desired, in which case, artists are encouraged to cast and perform the play in any configuration of identity they deem meaningful or useful.

  The author has often been asked in interviews if this work is mimicry or impressionism. It is not. Rather, when performed, it is a living document of speech in a moment and time in history. The actor is asked to take each real person at their word and with their word, to give full attention to their every utterance as recorded here.

  Though it was not the case when the On the Road series began in the late 1970s, technology now affords artists working on the production the opportunity to see exactly who the people are and how they behave physically and linguistically. Actors are therefore encouraged, unless it is contrary to the director’s vision, to use all available documentary footage of those represented in these pages in order to study their language and to use this study as another doorway into understanding and representing their identity.

  Punctuation and Repetition

  Punctuation is used to mark when speech starts and stops. Incomplete sentences and incomplete thoughts are intentional. Repeated words are intentional and should be spoken.

  The Presence of the Interviewer

  The interviewer’s presence is always implied. The interviewer is the audience. A lot of the show is direct address to the audience, but the audience should be thought of as a single individual unless the character is specifically talking to a crowd.

  The Slide

  Slides with the character’s name, their occupation or position, and a title of the piece that follows are a part of the play and a part of the text. It is sometimes useful to audiences to include the same information on an insert in the program. As the slides are essential to the audience’s understanding of what they’re watching, it is also helpful if the pedagogy of the slides is introduced once the house is opened. In that way, the audience will be primed to look at the slides in relationship to the performer. The slides and the information on the slides are an important guide.