Jamie Jobb's Backstage Pass: January 2020

“The person I listen to
the most is the audience.”
– Neil Simon

Anna Deavere Smith points Texas Gov. Ann Richards’ finger

And now …

Anna Deavere Smith Pauses

for Audience Identification

But first we pause for …

…Mark Twain who writes in "How To Tell A Story":

“The pause … is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length – no more and no less – or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and [if too long] the audience [will] have had time to divine that a surprise is intended – and then you can't surprise them, of course.”

by Jamie Jobb

Although Twain was referring to singular storytellers tossing tales from a podium, his thinking also holds true for actors employing “the pause" on stage. But there, timing is driven more by an audience than it is by any performer. It's simply not "polite" to both parties for players to talk over an audience. If an actor prematurely ends a pause to deliver another line while an audience is laughing or otherwise engaged, folks just won’t hear it and the player will “blow” the line. But, if the pause lasts too long, as Twain says, it gets too late for the actor’s surprise …What then?

Let’s look at that question from the point of the view of the audience – which seems to be a perfect place for someone to avoid the spotlight, to hide out. But let’s recall that strategy did not work too well for Lee Harvey Oswald who tried hiding in a Texas Theater audience in Dallas on November 22, 1963. After murdering a police officer and American president John F. Kennedy, Oswald was arrested right there in his own dang seat – fifth from the aisle, three rows from the back.

But if we can’t hide in an audience, at least we might want to disappear there for awhile. Anyone in an audience seeking attention during performance is usually escorted out of the building, while those of us who remain invisible still get to attend the show.

Most of us enjoy sitting as a group in the dark to watch other people – the outgoing people who belong on stage. But we don’t wanna be up there in the spotlight with them! I was reminded of all this at Berkeley Rep in 2011 when we saw performing playwright Anna Deavere Smith’s "Let Me Down Easy" which she delivered alone on stage.

Anna Deavere Smith is an academically-endowed MacArthur genius known to most folks as a tv sitcom actor (“The Practice,” “The West Wing,” “Nurse Jackie”). However her prime accomplishments are her solo performance works based on deep interviews she conducts with her subjects, all of whom she portrays on stage using their own words and mannerisms … including the pauses, interruptions, asides and other awkward silences inherent to her interviews.

The beauty of this “verbatim theater” work is how she may abut one interview against another opposing view expressed by the next character to speak. This was most stunningly evident to her audience for “Twilight Los Angeles”, based on her interviews after the Rodney King riots. In that play (which I saw three times!) she uses the words of a truck driver and the rioter who beat him to show they both had the very same dream: to devote a room in their home to enshrine that experience.

She did not say this directly. She “said it” by directly associating both stories, back-to-back, for an impact of climax change.

* * *

Smith is a larger-than-life woman who commands any space she occupies. Watch her work on stage a few minutes and it’s easy to imagine her as a child – larger than her peers – who got in tons of trouble for mimicking everybody around her. But actually she is extremely empathetic. Indeed, she occupies each of her characters’ physical presence through their very own words which she draws out of them with a tape recorder.

Smith constructs every solo performance from these raw audio logs. Indeed, they are actual “logs” – verbatim transcriptions – of her taped interviews which are presented on stage as if we’re just “hanging out” with her.

But these “logs” are also a lot like lumber. She cuts and rejoins them with an aural precision as she moves scene-to-scene character-to-character. In her previous plays (“Fires in the Mirror,” “Twilight Los Angeles”), Smith would just turn from a scene, grab a hat or other piece of costume from a coat-rack, and then turn back to the audience, donning the costume bit expeditiously to become her next character.

Anyone who saw "Let Me Down Easy,” saw the elegant evolution of these character transitions: man-servants now approached Smith from the audience to dress and guide her into her next scene. She was fully costumed with new hair and makeup as she assumed each new character, male or female.

For a somber show full of testimonials about the body and health care, Riccardo Hernandez’ exquisitely elegant stagecraft set the proper tone. The stage was framed by four huge mirrors, reflecting back bits of stage and audience dimly lit in the dark. These mirrors were perhaps six feet by twelve feet, hung vertically in a semicircle behind Smith’s performance, like the black tablets at the opening of “2001: A Space Odyssey” – or headstones.

Smith reflected therein, became – right before our eyes – Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, rodeo bull-rider Brent Williams, heavyweight champion Michael Bentt, performance artist Eve Ensler, supermodel Lauren Hutton, film critic Joel Siegel, sportswriter Sally Jenkins, fire-dancer Elizabeth Streb and former Texas Governor Ann Richards. All of them discussing issues of personal health, longevity, legacy. Deep drama, indeed.

Charles Isherwood’s review in The New York Times pointed out: “Smith is not the kind of performer who wholly disappears into the people she is portraying; she is too forceful a presence for that. Instead she channels their voices through her own, using the specifics of speech patterns more than any fancy vocal gymnastics to let us hear each as an individual.”

Keeping each interview distinctly in sequence is Smith’s most obvious narrative choice and she's done this for all her solo shows, including “Let Me Down Easy”. It’s difficult to imagine how she could change her basic story structure because she does not deconstruct the intimacy of her interviews by making characters artificially "talk" to each other across time and location. Nor does she offer any false narrative to connect her disconnected characters.

As she collects her stories, she knows they’re unique unto themselves and would be diluted or broken if they were actually mixed with other interviews. And they’d lose all their momentum if they were cut into another context.

Furthermore, we know from these straightforward monologues that Smith the interviewer is interacting with the person she is now “performing”, which means the audience “becomes” Smith at the interview, as Smith “becomes” the character. This role reversal allows us to “take her seat” so to speak, so we may inhabit her point of view. But what if she asks for our opinion?

* * *

“One of his patented dramatic effects would be

to stare intently at somebody in the crowd.

He’d pin their eyes like he was singing just to them,

whispering some secret, telling somebody something

where their lives hung in the balance.”

-- Bob Dylan

describing Dave Von Ronk on stage

* * *

There I was … trying to hide like Oswald in her audience at Berkeley Rep ... in the first row, first seat, house right. I hate sitting house right at Berkeley Rep's Thrust Stage. It’s just a feeling in the seat of my pants. I make sure the box office knows my personal seating bias, but we had out-of-town friends visiting and those were the only remaining four seats ... so we had to take them, or miss the show. This meant I was the audience member seated closest to Anna Deavere Smith on stage, she was less than ten feet away from me. Perhaps she noticed my discomfort in that seat?

Imagine my surprise when Smith, embodying Ann Richards, suddenly looked right at me and stopped! She had just come to the decisive moment in her monologue as Richards, and she paused as if to say to me with her silence:

"What now? YOU got anything for me?”

So I just gave her a quick thumbs up, which she immediately returned. Kinda like racquetball or doubles tennis. Man is she quick!?!

Pause … I realize everyone is still looking at me. So was Smith.

I really didn't know what to do. For some sort of dramatic emphasis, she’d just called me out of my audience comfort with that pause … But she continued to hold her gaze on ME! What should I do now? I don’t even remember what she was saying when she stopped to challenge me. “What’s my LINE!?!”

The long pause continued … What the heck’s going on?!?

Then, I decided to just blow her a kiss, but again … She tossed it right back!

Now, I couldn’t think of anything else to do! All I really could do was sink deeper into my seat and hope the audience’s attention eventually would drift back to the stage … so we could get on with the show we all paid for! Seriously, it was embarrassing. Although I’ve been on stage myself – often solo – perhaps a dozen times, her sudden “spotlight” made me very uncomfortable in that moment! Why would a veteran performer use a pause to put anyone on the spot like that?

Despite my discomfort in that moment, I still wanted to see “Let Me Down Easy” at least once more ... but tickets were gone. I wanted to see if “Ann Richards” would blow someone else another kiss and thus let me off the hook … I wanted to see if my own special moment with Anna Deavere Smith that night was just some oddball pause in Life’s Remote Control ... Or maybe she simply got lost in her text and was asking me for her next line … Or perhaps she was thinking about a cousin’s birthday … Or maybe she was simply stuck on my magnetic personality radiating there in the shadows. OK OK OK, I know it wasn’t about me …

But as Tom Petty always said – and Lee Harvey Oswald found out – when it all gets down to pauses … “the waiting is the hardest part.”