The New York Times-20080127-The Multiple Faces Of Anna Deavere Smith

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The Multiple Faces Of Anna Deavere Smith

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ANYONE who has seen one of Anna Deavere Smith's full-length theater works -- Fires in the Mirror or Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 -- will have some idea of what to expect at Let Me Down Easy, at Long Wharf through Feb. 3. For everyone else, a bit of an introduction is in order. But that's a problem. Ms. Smith wears so many hats -- and jackets and shoes and shirts -- that she pretty much defies definition. Oral historian, journalist, student, teacher, sociologist, playwright, documentarian, monologist, actor: taken together, these begin to suggest what happens when she goes off to investigate a chosen topic. She questions the people -- celebrated and not -- on all sides of it, pieces together verbatim excerpts from their taped answers and delivers the result to her audience in a series of miniature portraits.

Channeling Jewish housewives, black street children and Al Sharpton in her first project, she examined the events and emotions that led to and flowed from the murderous 1991 Crown Heights riots, touched off when an out-of-control car driven by a Brooklyn Hasid struck and killed a 7-year-old black child. She used the same techniques when racial violence exploded in Los Angeles after the policemen accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted.

This time, Ms. Smith is in search of the contradictions and warring impulses not within a community but within the human body. For much of the first half, Let Me Down Easy introduces us to men and women who have, one way or another, trained and shaped and prodded magnificent bodies to do miracles: athletes and artists and such. In the second half, we meet the inhabitants of ravaged instruments in dire need of miracles: victims of war, disaster and disease. There are also witnesses: journalists, relatives, doctors and, in one wordless encounter with a girl's death in Rwanda, Ms. Smith herself.

If it sounds like a global canvas, it is -- with more than the usual costume changes and production surprises to help cover the territory. And as she jumps from playing a model spurning a serving of French fries to a boxer who simply refuses to lose a bout and then to an enraged cancer victim, Ms. Smith honors the body's powerful allies: mind and heart.

Let Me Down Easy, by Anna Deavere Smith, is at Long Wharf Theater, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven, through Feb. 3. Information at (203) 787-4282 or www.longwharf.org. Charles Isherwood's review of Let Me Down Easy in the Jan. 22 Arts section of The New York Times can be found on the theater page at nytimes.com.

[Illustration]PHOTO: HARD TO DEFINE: Smith in Let Me Down Easy. (PHOTOGRAPH BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON)