Anna Deavere Smith is perhaps one of the greatest artists of our time. She has recently created a piece that speaks to one of the greatest issues of our time: the school-to-prison pipeline: what happens when children of color are suspended, expelled and arrested out of proportion to their numbers in the student population, placing them on a path to juvenile hall or prison. Notes From The Field: Doing Time in Education, The California Chapter is written and performed by Smith and accompanied by jazz bassist, bandleader and composer Marcus Shelby. It is taken from interviews she had with almost 150 teachers, students, cops and criminals affected by this social and racial imbalance in Northern California and throughout the nation. This issue is intensely personal for Ms. Smith; her mother was a teacher at a school in am economically disadvantaged Baltimore neighborhood. Notes From The Field seeks to display the staggering statistics as relatable human beings and literally engage audiences not only to be more informed, but to become catalysts for real change. In fact, the second Act turns the tables on the audiences and solicits their participation in the discourse.
Anna Deavere Smith is no stranger to using art for social change. Her piece on the racial tensions sparking the LA riots, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, was nominated for a Tony Award in 1994. Fires in the Mirror, based on the 1991 Crown Heights riots, won a Drama Desk Award. The 2009 Off-Broadway production Let Me Down Easy challenged the American healthcare system. Now Smith brings her “documentary theatre” to the front lines of this nation’s educational inequities.
Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes From The Field: Doing Time in Education, The California Chapter is playing now until August 2nd at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. For tickets and more information visit www.berkeleyrep.org
Here is your personal invitation to the production:
Created, written, and performed by Anna Deavere Smith / Music composed and performed by Marcus Shelby / Directed by Leah C. Gardiner
Special Presentation / Roda Theatre / July 11–August 2, 2015
