Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation

Abstract

A woman faces the camera, her voice nasal and New York. Roz Malamud speaks with the kind of accent that sounds Jewish. wish I could [...] go on television. I wanna scream to the whole world. [...] I don't love my neighbors, I don't know my neighbors. A few minutes later television time, Carmel Cato, from the same Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood as Malamud, but a world away, his voice roundly black in its tones, talks through tears about how a car slammed into his daughter, Angela, and his seven-year-old son, Gavin, killing him. Angela she was on the ground but she was trying to move. Gavin was still. They was trying to pound him. I was trying to explain it was my kid! These two people-plus many others: men and women, professors and street people, blacks, Jews, rabbis, reverends, lawyers, and politicians-are enacted by Anna Deavere Smith, an African American performer of immense abilities. My concern here will not be with the events in Brooklyn in 1991 and 1992, nor with the black-white race thing that continues to torture America, but with Smith's artwork. I want to investigate how Smith does what she does in Fires in the Mirror.