Let Me Down Easy - Ms. Smith's show improves with age

My eyes are still recovering from seeing Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman tour de force, "Let Me Down Easy." Saw it opening night, two months ago, from a seat quite high up at the Roda Stage. Caught today's matinee from the third row, with my ancient mother, at the theater in the round, at the Main Stage of the Berkeley Rep. Profound to see every pore on the actress' face as she morphs from character to character, to hear her breathing as though one were standing intimately close (she's miked), and to analyze the minute details that have changed as the show has evolved.

Seems there are more props today - and that they created a few extra hazards for the barefoot actress on the stage as they accumulated portrait by portrait. But, none of that really mattered as much as the emotional intensity I felt emanating from some of her characters, as though I now knew these people in real life, having met them in June....her macho Lance Armstrong, her wickedly feminist Eve Ensler, her second-gen Jamaican boxer Michael Bentt, her Big Persona Texas Governor Ann Richards, her nebbishly funny movie reviewer Joel Siegel, her elegant Reverend Gomez...and so many more...all these amazing people embodied by Anna Deavere Smith, as directed by Leonard Foglia, each telling their own story of life and the fight to be, of survival, and ultimately, of confronting mortality.

My face was wet, and I had some tissues with me, as though I had expected this. But, the raw power of today's show really had me in a salt-water deluge. Standing ovation.
The show has been extended til September 4, 2011. See it!

Links to resources on ADS: http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/de_resources.asp

Links to interviews with ADS: http://bigthink.com/annadeaveresmith#!video_idea_id=5420

See my first review posted June 2, 2011: http://characteractress.blogspot.com/search?q=Let+Me+Down+Easy

Lining things up

It's been a busy January so far. I joined Theater Bay Area in the hopes of widening my circle of active theater workers in search of more opportunities. http://www.theatrebayarea.org/
This provides an additional listing for my acting resume as well as my job-job resume. TBA offers lots of great discounts, including a discount for healthcare, for Zipcar, and for a variety of local events.

I started my second class on storytelling, Intermediate Storytelling with Kirk Waller at Stagebridge http://www.stagebridge.org/aboutus.htm in Oakland. Check our Kirk at http://kirkwaller.com/

I'm taking the opportunity offered by South Bay director Dan Carlson www.SpiralMoon.com, to record a monologue on video. So, we shoot in the coming weeks. I am going to trot out the story I worked on in class with the wonderful Master Storyteller Jeanne Haynes. It's all about my recent adventures in real estate. I told it last time in class in about 10 minutes. Now I have to refocus it for the screen and shorten it. Dan is offering this opportunity to actors, performers, musicians, magicians, and more. For a small fee we will have our monologues linked into a new website called Talent23, which goes up soon.

And, finally - finally! I'm getting my acting reel together, after three years in this business. I have enough clips and bits and pieces, certainly, to get two decent minutes edited together. Now I have clips in English, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican accent in English, and French.

Soon I will also get new headshots. I look different every day. Is it the aging process in acceleration mode, then back in relaxation mode, all mixed up, hour by hour? It will be up to my wonderful photographer Eduardo Solér to help me figure out what look works now. The goal: to look my best, but within a range that, when I walk into an audition, people know it's me! Since I started playing with straighter hair, and my last set of headshots were curly, it's been interesting to observe casting directors' reactions. Listen, curls can always come back. Keeping hair straight is not that easy. (Did you catch Anna Deveare Smith's wonderful interview with Paula Zahn on PBS last night after the airing of the "Great Performances" version of her one-woman show, "Let Me Down Easy"? She has totally changed her look since her wild and curly days. Coincidentally, we did it around the same time. See my August 2011 review of the show at http://characteractress.blogspot.com/search?q=Let+me+down+easy )

I have an answer for this age-old question from Dr. Phil: "Are you excited about your life?"
Yes I am!

Five-minute standing ovation last night for Anna Deavere Smith

"Conceived, written, and performed by"....What juicy words! Anna Deavere Smith's performance of her one-woman-playing-many-men-and-women play, "Let Me Down Easy" is a raging success, as anyone who was at last night's gala witnessed. Directed by Leonard Foglia, this astonishing solo tour de force is based on the simplest idea - an interview with a well-known athlete or writer or hospital administrator or priest or intellectual or mother or aunt - with an unseen interlocutor. Smith, who interviewed at least 300 people to create this script, embodies the characters and their intellect, their passions, their pain, and their inner light, as she moves seamlessly from one to the next on a simple hardwood-floor stage with a modern white couch, a white coffee table, white conference table, and a lovely French chair. A few props here and there, and an occasional delivery of drink or food by a woman who could be assistant, maid, nurse, or hotel worker add context to what is in essence a riveting one-hour and 40-minute monologue of divine intimacy delivered by Ms. Smith, dressed in black slacks and a white shirt.

Anna Deavere Smith, a MacArthur genius grant winner who studied linguistics early in her career, has a strong, unwavering voice able to transmit a variety of dialects, intonations, cadences, and personality quirks. One moment she's a testosterone-laden Lance Armstrong, another moment she's intense feminist Even Ensler, and then, a sad boxer in the ring recalling his Caribbean-accented father, or the wise director of an orphanage for children with AIDS in South Africa, a verbose Schubert expert, and later, a wise-cracking Texas governor, and a serene Buddhist monk. These folks blow their noses, cough, stutter, laugh, chuckle, and repeat themselves - all to brilliant effect. 

Smith's intellect is laser focused as she pulls everyone's stories together with wit, depth, and nuance. Among other themes, she weaves family, health care in America, race, class, religion, and human values around and through what it's all about - this thing called death.

Here's a clip of Anna Deavere Smith on the Berkeley Rep's website:  

http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/4556.asp
and this on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/deaveresmith_02-07.html

The show opened May 28 and, at this writing, has been extended through July 10.