Ms. Smith Comes to washington

...True to the spirit of the city, Anna Deavere Smith has come to Washington and failed up...

...She has now come to Washington's Arena Stage with her first full-blown theatrical production—a more-than-one-woman show, complete with a troupe of actors, stage sets, intermissions, lots of props, the works...

...In Washington, with a larger budget than any heretofore available to her, Smith hired a small army of researchers, historians, personal assistants, and tape transcribers to assist in her work, along with the more conventional actors and technicians...

...She is a tenured professor of drama at Stanford, and has held fellowships at Yale and Harvard...

...Her gifts are real enough, but they are for mimicry and journalism...

...House Arrest opens with a monologue—again, taped and transcribed and performed verbatim—from a tour guide at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello...

...And when she played a Jewish housewife from Brooklyn, she might have been a drag queen doing Barbra Streisand...

...What she has learned about the presidency is that Jefferson did it with Sally Hemings...

...And while she recites her subjects verbatim, the impressions occasionally manifest that greatest of contemporary horribles, the ethnic stereotype...

...But as the great anchorman sails into the sunset, Smith is taking on Cronkite-like dimensions, which is to say she has become a public personage festooned with honors and awards, universally revered, a sage to some and a saint to others but to all right-thinking persons a figure whose every act and pronouncement is beyond criticism...

...There is a play within the play...

...With the success of her recent shows, corporate America has fallen at her feet, joining the already-seduced nonprofit sector...

...Whatever that may mean, she is apparently still looking...

...When the guide stops talking, we see Sally on the sales block, baring her teeth and flexing her arms for prospective buyers, and then we see Sally about to be bedded by randy Tom, and then, from nowhere, out pops a woman—a skinny woman!—impersonating R.W Apple as he sips Chablis and chuckles pompously...

...On occasion the mimicry is uncannily precise, but more often it is simply a distraction...

...Craftsmanship at Arena Stage By Andrew Ferguson The performance artist Anna Deavere Smith is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, if you see what I mean...

...In her book version of Twilight, for example, she notes that, "depending on your point of view," the riot in Los Angeles could be called a "riot," an "uprising," or a "rebellion...

...She gets windier as she grows in public esteem...

...Her impersonation of Al Sharpton, in Fires in the Mirror, sounded like Steppin Fetchit after a night of freebasing...

...The most exciting individual in American theatre right now is Anna Deavere Smith," said Newsweek after Twilight opened...

...But the thing is, that takes money...

...But by the play's bittersweet close, all the loose ends are neatly resolved, leaving only the questions of what, precisely, House Arrest is supposed to be about, and why, more to the point, the vast institutional resources of American do-goodery have been mobilized to support a woman of such modest gifts...

...Smith of course did—only one among many honors certifying her as such...

...It is forced to hire three prisoners on work release to qualify for a grant, and when the actors venture to Washington, trouble ensues...

...I wanted to look at what was behind the scenes in the theater and to have a nontraditional relationship with aspects of it...

...She selects thirty or so of these to perform, and juxtaposes them to achieve various dramatic or comic effects...

...Of course, her evenhandedness is itself a kind of editorializing...

...Everyone has gone to a great deal of trouble...

...Although she's black, the performer she most resembles is the comic Lily Tomlin, minus (alas) the jokes...

...As with Cronkite, whose portentous baritone and billowy jowls convinced vast numbers of Americans that he possessed a singular intellectual seriousness, however implausibly, there is a kernel of talent around which the cult of Anna Deavere Smith has been constructed...

...What she has accomplished is an American masterpiece...

...you'd have to put up with Stone Phillips, but at least he doesn't do the annoying impersonations...

...For one thing, the play is ostensibly about Washington political culture, specifically the office of the president...

...Smith has been writing House Arrest for two years, and as you watch the play you can't help but wonder what she's been doing with all her time...

...House Arrest is hard to follow...

...And so it continues, scene by scene...

...Published in book form, the monologues are laid out in broken lines suggesting a kind of free verse, as though archy and mehitabel had suddenly gone nuts...

...Under her coaching, her actors impersonate a Who's Who of federal Washington: the spheroid New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple, Labor secretary Alexis Herman, the first lady's former chief of staff Maggie Williams, George Steph-anopoulos, James Carville, Mike McCurry, Sam Donaldson, Dee Dee Myers . . . and, for balance, Peggy Noonan, a Republican...

...The made-up plot involves a theatrical troupe searching for grant money ("Write about what you know," say the drama textbooks...

...On stage, however, she shifts characters with apparent ease, from Korean shopkeepers to young crack addicts to Lubavitcher rabbis and suburban matrons...

...She is, like Cronkite, unassailable, though no one can say why...

...This play promises to take us thrillingly beyond the habitual practice of our craft towards a new American theater...

...Smith is obsessed with race—confronting the "tough issues" so beloved of the nonprofit sector and corporate philanthropists—even as she carefully avoids being "judgmental," which would scare off the check-writers, not to mention the drama critic at Newsweek...

...Whatever its failings as theater, House Arrest is a triumph of grantsmanship...

...The list of sponsors for House Arrest reads like a cross between the New York Stock Exchange and The Foundation Directory...

...By contrast, House Arrest is far more ambitious than the earlier works...

...She is the ultimate impressionist: She does people's souls," said the New York Times...

...the theme recurs like a tape loop...

...this is the part Smith has conjured from her imagination, and it turns out that as a playwright she has a taste for melodrama...

...The difference is that Homer never won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant...

...And after the play closes in Washington on January 4, they will go to a great deal more, as the House Arrest industry decamps to theaters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle...

...She reaches frequently for aphorism and invariably fails...

...It is fitting that House Arrest: First Edition debuted in Washington...

...To concoct her shows she tapes interviews with scores of people—scholars, celebrities, ordinary Joes and Janes—and then edits the transcripts into brief monologues...

...Last year, the Ford Foundation named her its first "artist-in-residence...

...So she presents rioters and cops, crack addicts and bystanders as equally sympathetic...

...This is as close as our culture can come to the impact of Homer...

...Her shows are filmed and aired by PBS...

...The show runs for three hours, as compared with two hours for Twilight and ninety minutes for Fires...

...For the play is a work in progress...

...Money is no longer a problem...

...Earlier this month, Harvard announced that it was spending an initial grant of $1.5 million to create a dramatic institute around Smith, "a hybrid between an artists colony and a think tank...

...It is meant to be a real play, like the kind they do, you know, in regular theaters...

...In the arts today—to quote the nightly send-off of an earlier sage—that's the way it is...

...In other words, House Arrest: First Edition is a mess...

...For another, Washington is a place where people who perform badly in their previous jobs are often rewarded with advancement, acquiring radio shows (Ollie North, Mary Matalin), lucrative lobbying firms (Robert Packwood), even cabinet posts (Robert McNamara, Warren Christopher, et al...

...House Arrest has become a small industry, operating out of the Arena Stage and a two-bedroom apartment across the street...

...Of course, Walter Cronkite is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, as he was of the sixties, seventies, and eighties...

...But the main-streaming of Anna Deavere Smith has been revealing nonetheless...

...As if that weren't enough, a group of "dedicated individuals," co-chaired by Washington socialites Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, even formed The Friends of Anna Deavere Smith to push the production's budget over the $2 million mark...

...This pseudo-agnosticism suits perfectly the sensibilities of skittish rich people in the late 1990s, who ache to be socially relevant but don't want some performance artist giving the help any crazy ideas...

...I decided for this project I wanted to have a different relationship to the theater," Smith has said...

...I bet the only f—g that goes on around here is star-f—g," says one actor...

...She cannot cross a street in New York City without being nominated for a Tony or an Obie...

...I always wanted to work with a company of actors," Smith has said...

...She wrote much of the play herself, as playwrights do, but she has also interspersed many of her trademark interviews with the fictional material...

...A skeptic might see in this estab-lishmentarian largesse a resurgence of the 1970s phenomenon of radical chic...

...Something similar happened to Cronkite...

...In 1997, however, radicalism isn't chic...

...It sure looked like a riot on TV But she prefers the term "events...

...If this project is a legitimate search for American character," Smith has said, "then somewhere in my journey I had to come to the so-called 'center.' I had to come to Washington and I had to learn something about the presidency...

...Riot, rebellion— who's to know...

...But let Douglas Wager, Arena's artistic director, explain: "Anna Dea-vere Smith holds a vision as a theater artist, which is to search for our American character through the art and craft of acting, using the language and behavior of our historic and present cultural identity...

...Her last two plays were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize...

...In all she has taped more than three hundred and fifty subjects for the new work...

...I wanted one which would not just be about me and the audience...

...Now forty-six years old, she spent the 1980s performing a series of one-woman shows—a "body of work," as she puts it, entitled On the Road: A Search for American Character...

...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...

...There's no music here," observes another pensively...

...She splashed into public consciousness in 1991, with a one-woman show, Fires in the Mirror, about the race riots in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and followed it up in 1993 with a one-woman show about the race riots in Los Angeles, Twilight: Los Angeles...

...Just the smell of achievement...

...She seems never to have gotten a bad review...

...Those questions are impolite in any case...

...There's little point in dwelling for long on the play itself...

...She is a performance artist the way the Hope Diamond is a rock," said the Washington Post earlier this year...

...The production at Arena Stage has been made possible by generous grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Philip Morris, the Cummings Foundation, Fannie Mae, the Siemens Corporation, AT&T, the Cafritz Foundation—and many others, including you, in your capacity as taxpayer, through the National Endowment for the Arts...

...Confronted with her work, they are often seized by a delirious case of blurbitis: "dazzling," "extraordinary," "overpowering...

...Smith's failure in her first large-scale effort will surprise the critics, assuming they acknowledge it...

...Smith is not as famous as Cronkite, needless to say, for she plays to a much smaller audience, in a much smaller venue...

...You could get the same thing from Dateline NBC...

...Fires and Twilight were thus not so much plays as impressionistic documentaries—works of journalism, loosely defined, in which a succession of subjects discussed the question of race in America...

...Several of her fictional characters attend a party at the Jockey Club, a favorite watering hole of the political class...