Listening is the key to Anna Deavere Smith’s creative process.

Topic: The Creative Process

Anna Deavere Smith: Well the goal is to tell a story that has multiple points of view for the very reasons that we’ve been discussing; and to, by doing so, indicate on an artistic level that the old idea of the single author, if you will, is flawed. Because it takes ultimately many people to tell the story of a community, or the story of a society.

So that sense of the auguste author who can come in and speak for women and speak for men, I don’t believe that. Maybe your imagination is sufficient; maybe not, you know? My imagination comes into play.  But before doing that, I would like to know how a man feels, or how another woman feels about something. I’m studying that because I understand that I’m one human being with a set of experiences that color my lens. And I’ve always been – since I was a little girl – very interested in how that person across the town, across the street, how they think. And understanding I could never think like they think, but wanting to try to do something about that gap. Not even in a humanistic way.

It was really something that bothered me. It was really something I worried about. So first of all, I hope that by being present, as 46 people say in Twilight, the play about the [1992] Los Angeles riots, and playing a Korean woman whose store was burned to the ground by African-Americans; or playing one of the African-American kids who beat up the white man; or playing Daryl Gates, the very unpopular Chief of Police, then it suggests to an audience that they don’t have to sit in their one position.

And by the way, when I come out at the end and take my curtain call, I’m still me. So did I really lose anything? No. In fact maybe I gained something. Aesthetically and artistically, what I’ve been trying to contribute is something about details that maybe there’s a wider variety of human beings than we thought about. And we can tell compelling stories without having to have those same stereotypes that we’ve been thinking about over and over again.

Recorded on: Aug 22, 2007