She is bold, brash and in your face. Her dramatic live stage compositions make you think. And that is exactly what Anna
Deavere Smith set out to do.
An award-winning solo theater actor, Smith is a pioneer of the journalistic style of portraying multiple characters drawn verbatim from interviews she conducts. One of the foremost solo theater artists of our time, Smith performs her Off-Broadway hit Let Me Down Easy in seven shows presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus's historic Lincoln Theatre, February 22–27, 2011. These shows mark the first Midwest performances of this one-woman tour-de-force about the power of the body, the cost of health care, and the resilience of the human spirit, revealed through the voices of 20 real-life character- from celebrities to everyday citizens - whose stories offer various perspectives on dealing with injury, illness, and mortality. Together, these dramatic vignettes add up to a night of moving, thought-provoking, and entertaining theater.
To create this show, Smith drew verbatim from hundreds of interviews she conducted over a period of nine years to develop the play's text. In the show, Smith portrays - with uncanny versatility - 20 public figures and others who have dealt with serious health issues and challenges, including cycling champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong; regularly banged-up rodeo star Brent Williams; supermodel Lauren Hutton; a physician in a New Orleans hospital, post-Katrina; and movie critic Joel Siegel and former Texas governor Ann Richards, both of whom eventually succumbed to cancer.
A professor at New York University, Smith's TV credits include The West Wing, The Practice, and, currently, the acclaimed
Showtime comedy series Nurse Jackie, in which she plays hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus. She has appeared on film in Philadelphia (1993) and The American President (1995) and The Human Stain (2003).
Smith will also engage in a Director's Dialogue on Monday, February 28 at 7 PM in Mershon Auditorium, with Steven G.
Gabbe, senior vice president for Health Sciences and chief executive officer at the Ohio State University Medical Center, and prominent legal scholar Patricia Williams, about the process of creating Let Me Down Easy and the past, present, and future of medical care in the United States on. This event is free and open to the public.
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