By Robert Simonson
12 Oct 2009

Let Me Down Easy star-creator Anna Deavere Smith
photo by Joan Marcus

Actress-writer Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, now Off-Broadway, explores the human body and spirit.

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For Anna Deavere Smith, timing is everything. Her unique brand of documentary theatre is intrinsically connected to contemporary events. In her most famous works, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, she impersonated living people, both famous and anonymous, whom she had interviewed about the incendiary circumstances surrounding, respectively, the 1991 Crown Heights riots and the 1992 social upheaval in L.A. following the Rodney King verdict. Her latest piece, Let Me Down Easy, however, presents a somewhat trickier proposition. An examination of the human body, our relationship to it and the way we care for it, the play is not connected to any specific incident. It lacks the innate, and easily marketable, urgency of her previous work. However, Smith has been given a healthy assist by recent headlines: Let Me Down Easy arrives at Off-Broadway's Second Stage just as health care reform has become the social issue of the hour.

"We didn't pick the time," says Smith. "It just turned out this way. Let's hope the discussion lasts until the play opens."

Recent events — particularly the fiery, much-analyzed Town Hall meetings, in which politicians came face to face with angry citizens supposedly livid over President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health care system — forced Smith to revise the play, even as it entered rehearsals in New York. "Two weeks ago, I was up in Buffalo on my way home, and I decided to go right out to Montana and Colorado where the president was going for the Town Hall meetings," she said in an interview in late August. "As it turned out, everyone in the Town Hall in Montana was quite enamored of the president."

The play's journey has been a long one, starting in New Haven in the late '90s when the head of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine wrote Smith to ask if she would like to be a visiting professor, to interview doctors and patients and make a presentation. She presented the result in 2000 and has been honing and adding to her work ever since. Smith's research has taken her to South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda; the Landstuhl Hospital in Germany, which services U.S. troops from Iraq; New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; and Washington, DC.

She has presented Let Me Down Easy at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, and at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT. The national conversation has changed since she began talking to people a decade ago. "I always thought having a better relationship to health care would be a no-brainer. When I started this project, no one was really talking about health care reform. In the course of these eight years, it's become something that people are more interested in. I've paid attention to the way people talk about their doctors, how they talk about bad things that have happened to friends and family. You would think that most people are dissatisfied with their health care. But the polls are coming back to us that people are happy with what they have. I'm surprised by that."

Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy
photo by Joan Marcus