"Is Race a Trope?": Anna Deavere Smith and the question of racial performativity

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Debby Thompson

"Is race a trope?" Anna Deavere Smith's performances not only ask but embody this question. They also ask another, equally important question: "Who is asking?"

Anna Deavere Smith is an African American performance artist known for her technique of interviewing subjects, particularly on matters of race, and then recreating her subjects' responses with a difference on-stage. She has recently gained tremendous popularity for her work Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, part of her larger project "On the Road: A Search for American Character." The question in my title, "Is Race a Trope?", comes, however, not from me or from Anna Deavere Smith per se but from a performance of Smith's in which she recreates an interview she conducted with academic and critical theorist Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. (1) Early in the development of her technique of interviewing and then performing people of diverse races, ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions, Anna Deavere Smith performed an edited interview she'd conducted with Smith-Rosenberg, who asks and explores the question "Is race a trope?" The answer to this question for Smith-Rosenberg is complex, and Anna Deavere Smith's performance of Smith-Rosenberg's answer is even more complex. Not only do both social theorists say that identity, in this case racial identity, is experienced as both a fact and as a trope, but Anna Deavere Smith incorporates this post-structuralist model of racial identity into her acting approach. The question "Is race a trope?" is all the more interesting when it is asked in the context of a black woman (Smith), playing a white woman (Smith-Rosenberg), asking the question of the black woman who is now playing her.

First, however, to get to the question of race as a trope, and how Anna Deavere Smith has developed an acting technique that can embrace the complexity of this question. I want to move back to the context of current acting practices, and then forward again into Anna Deavere Smith's interventions into approaches to racial identity and character in theater.

What I am calling Anna Deavere Smith's post-structuralist acting practices arose not out of her engagement with post-structuralist race theory but out of her frustration with acting based in "psychological realism" (Fires xxvi). While poststructuralist models of identity--notions of identity as "performative"--have become almost dogma in current literary theory, acting practice in the U.S. has been slow to reflect this shift in models of identity, and is still very much based in liberal humanism. Although anti-Naturalistic traditions, which have been quite strong in European drama, have always had a presence in American drama (in forms such as expressionism, surrealism, even camp and neo-melodrama), the preponderant mode has remained firmly a Naturalistic one.

There have, of course, been many notable exceptions to Naturalistic theater in the U.S. Some prominent ones include The Living Theatre of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the work of Joseph Chaikin and Roberta Sklar and the Open Theatre, El Teatro Campesino's Boal-influenced people's theatre, Richard Schechner's Environmental Theatre approaches, the Wooster Croup, the campy, postmodem productions of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater and of the WOW Cafe, and many other experimental and avant-garde theaters. (2) The most immediate precursor to Anna Deavere Smith's work is that of Adrienne Kennedy, whose 1964 Funnyhouse of a Negro takes a highly post-structuralist, anti-Naturalistic approach to character and identity, (3) and whose A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, which Smith directed in 1980, Smith credits as the beginning of her non-Naturalistic approach to personae and psychic life (Tate 198). Interestingly, the European anti-Naturalistic form that is most clearly a precursor to post-structuralist theater -- Brechtian alienation and Epic Theater--has had very little presence in American drama, and particularly in mainstream (Broadway and off-Broadway) theater, as can be seen in actors' training approaches.

The preponderant philosophy underlying acting approaches taught in the U.S. remains one of liberal humanism. The majority of actors' training programs in North America continue to operate in variations of the Stanislavsky approach (or its American incarnation, Method Acting), which views human nature as transcultural and transhistorical, and views a character's identity as having an essential core of interior objectives and the character's (or actor's) bodily acts as the outward manifestations of the character's interior identity. The "Naturalistic" Acting Approach varies from the versions of Stanislavsky himself to those of, for example, Uta Hagen, Sanford Meisner, Eric Morris, and William H. Macy and David Mamet. As different as these various commonly taught approaches seem to be, all believe that human nature is universal, and that the essence of acting is to uncover the human spirit, to bring out the universal in the specifics of human life. For example, the Practical Handbook for the Actor states that "t he world needs theatre and the theatre needs actors who will bring the truth of the human soul to the stage" (Bruder et al. 7), and Hagen states that "internal" (or Naturalistic) acting "can become as timeless as human experience itself" (13).