If you’re looking for some intellectual—and emotional--stimulation, don’t miss performance artist Anna Deavere Smith’s transcendently gorgeous Let me Down Easy, running through December 6 at The Second Stage Theater. http://www.2st.com.
If you’ve been watching Nurse Jackie on cable, you will recognize Smith for as the deliciously stiff hospital administrator. In Let Me Down Easy, which Smith wrote and in which she plays all the parts, she explores the fragility and resilience of the body, the health care system, and our attitudes toward death. If that doesn’t sound like something to rush out and see in the pre-holiday season, you’re wrong. Smith is the real deal—an artist who makes you look at the things you’ve looked at all your life and see them in a new way. Yeah, yeah, sometimes you just want to watch the chandelier fall in The Phantom of the Opera. But Let Me Down Easy is riveting, inspiring, surprisingly funny...and a damn good tonic for a consumer headache.
As in her previous one-woman plays Fires in the Mirror (about racial tensions in Crown Heights, Brooklyn) and Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992 (centering on the aftermath of the Rodney King trial), Smith embodies a wide range of “characters”—real people she has interviewed, delivering their words verbatim, complete with quirks and mannerisms. On a simple, functionally elegant set, Smith channels celebrities (Lance Armstrong, the late Texas governor Ann Richards, Lauren Hutton, Eve Ensler) and so-called ordinary people (if you consider it ordinary to tend to orphaned children in South Africa, or to try to help the indigent as the floodwaters of Katrina rise…or to wrestle with your own mortality). The monologues are strung together with a kind of poetic logic that makes the show zip along, and while it can’t help but reverberate the current health care debates, there’s nothing preachy or soap-box-y. For me, the most moving vignette involved Smith’s elderly aunt, who recalled her sister’s final words—and the warmth of her mother’s body.
For more on Anna Deavere Smith, go to http://www.more.com/6468/7947-anna-deavere-smith-s-let-me
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