Let Me Down Easy
Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show Let Me Down Easy is billed as "A play in evolution" because Smith is constantly re-shaping and re-examining the material she’s gathered in her interviews with... well, at times, it seems like just about everybody.
The current version of Let Me Down Easy incorporates the words of The Rev. Peter Gomes, former Governor of Texas Ann Richards, photographer Cheryl Diaz Meyer, opera singer Jessye Norman, and assorted theologians, imams, monks, professors, artists, sports figures, medical professionals, and survivors... as well as perpetrators... of the Rwandan genocide--complete with Smith’s re-creation of each person’s mannerisms, inflections, and accents.
To say that Smith puts these people across through mimicry would be insufficient, for all that she has worked with a movement consultant (Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish), a dialect coach (Amy Stoller), and a voice coach (Marya Lowry) for this production.
What Smith does is closer to a form of alchemy, or perhaps channeling; she not only embodies the words of her interview subjects, but imbues them with an authenticity of delivery that both honors the source and leaves room for a palpable affection and empathy with those whose interviews have led to the creation of the play.
The subject that Smith explores with these varied and far-flung individuals is that of grace. What is it? How should be think about? Can we possess it... or does it avail itself of us?
Smith’s quite credible Gomes (I knew him at once, noticing the projected titles that identified the various characters only later on) speaks about grace in terms of the spiritual composition Amazing Grace, which, Gomes / Smith informs us, was the work of English slave trader John Newton. (We are also told, by Smith’s incarnation of opera singer Jessye Norman, that Newton based the tune on an African melody.)
Theologian James Cone also addresses this song, and its concept of religious grace; Cone’s is a gregarious, exhorting voice at all times, providing the play with its title.
But the religious meaning of the word is only an entree into Smith’s explorations, as she then talks with horse jockey agent Robert Munoz (a fast-talking sort, with the energy of a sporting impresario the likes of Don King) and jockey Gabriel Saez about the physical grace of horses and the men who ride them--a chat that turns, suddenly and with heartfelt regret, to another form of grace: that of acceptance, as the men recollect the freak accident that led to the death of a great horse, Eight Belles.
The idea of grace can only be illustrated so far without resort to its notional opposite, and thus Smith also incorporates interviews centered around disgraceful subjects: the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu politicians, despite being married to Tutsi wives (a great social honor, we are told), spur on their ethnic brethren in the slaughter of the Tutsis, with even half-Tutsi children, along with their mothers, being surrendered to the killer militias by Hutu fathers. (The politicians, while demanding the extermination of everyone with a drop of Tutsi blood, did not deign to see their own wives put to the machete.)
Smith talks to people from both sides of the genocide, and teases out the meaning of grace in the aftermath: it is not, as one might assume, forgiveness: forgiveness comes when a wrongdoer asks it of his victim. In absence of that recognition and request, one survivor says, she simply gives the killers grace: a wish for their, and her own, freedom from the horrors of the past.
Another disgraceful episode plays a part here: the 2004 debacle of the deluge that swamped New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Smith personifies several medical professionals in this production, including a dean at a medical program who finds out first hand what sort of incompetence the teaching hospital’s patients face, and a Stanford Medical School dean who laments the state of a health care system that seeks to turn medical service into a product, but the story told by a female doctor at a hospital for the poor in New Orleans is a chilling account of abandonment, given nobility by the dedication of nurses who refused to turn away from the patients in their care despite six days of extremely trying conditions.
Smith finds a thread of humor throughout, suggesting that whatever view we may take of grace, laughter will not be far removed. A laughing Buddhist monk talks about death and existentialism, as does the doctor of an orphanage; a Harvard professor finds glory, and simple delight, in her garden of herbs and flowers; Ann Richards, once the governor of Texas, shares her struggle with cancer, revealing her strategy of preserving her "chi," or life energy. Even the dead-on impersonation of Rev. Gomes, with Smith folding her hands over her chest, never failed to elicit fond laughter.
The sound design (by David Remedios) and music round out the dramatic impact of Smith’s script and performance. Joshua Redman’s jazz score boils, soothes, and cries out; a selection from Schubert’s Quintet plays at a moment when nothing else would have been appropriate for the text or the mood. Michael Chybowski’s lighting is skillful and unobtrusive, casting sunlight through a mosque window or lending a gentle glow to a garden scene.
The physical production is about perfect, with David Rockwell’s set design a mix of indoor and outdoor spaces: plain wooden flooring that could belong to a sumptuous room or a garden deck; rocks and tufts of grass surrounding the floor; and a corrugated backdrop that opens up to reveal a screen for rear-projected images, including photos of the interview subjects that eerily echo Smith’s interpretations.
Do I say they echo her? Smith makes it seem so with her grasp of what makes individuals tick; like an oracle, Smith seems to tap into some source that powers all of humanity, in all of its grandeur and brutish failure. Bringing both of those things together, as she does, is Smith’s most triumphant illustration of that mysterious thing, the grace that she’s chasing after.
Let Me Down Easy plays through October 11 at the American Repertory Theater, located at the Loeb Drama Center at j64 Brattle Street in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.
Performance schedule: Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m.; Tuesday-Thursday at 7:30; Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. (There will be no performances on 9/17 or 10/07.)
Tickets cost $15-$79 and can be obtained at www.amrep.org or at the box office. Group rates are available.
For more information, including a schedule of pre- and post-play events, please visit www.amrep.org online.
