Monday’s NewsHour: Anna Deavere Smith in ‘Let Me Down Easy’

Anna Deavere Smith first shot to national prominence in the early ’90s with her remarkable one-woman shows, one about the race riots in Crown Heights in New York following a murder (“Fires in the Mirror”), and another about the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King trial and verdict (“Twilight: Los Angeles”).

In those shows and many others, Smith created works that offer numerous perspectives on controversial subjects, which are based on the real accounts of real people. Smith’s ability to transform into those individuals — sometimes more than twenty people in a given show — is one of her more remarkable talents. But those transformations don’t come easily.

Monday on the NewsHour, Judy Woodruff sits down with Smith for a look at her latest work, Let Me Down Easy, which takes up the many-voiced debate on health care in America. You can find that segment here.

In this extended interview clip, Judy asks Smith how she initially learned the skills that would become the foundation of her Tony-winning theater career:

 
Watch a clip of Anna Deveare Smith performing as Dr. Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, a New Orleans physician who was working at Charity Hosptial during Hurricane Katrina, in “Let Me Down Easy”: