Present-Tense Playwright

In 100 years the impeachment of President Clinton may serve as inspiration for some sort of neo-Shakespearean tragedy. Or maybe it’ll just be a nasty little chapter of history nobody cares about anymore.

But the future is beside the point for actress-playwright Anna Deavere Smith as she struggles to bring “House Arrest: An Introgression,” her unfolding drama of the American presidency and the media, to the stage--right now, smack in the middle of it.

Los Angeles audiences probably best remember Smith, 48, from her solo work “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” presented at the Mark Taper Forum in 1993. Smith explored the Los Angeles riots by portraying a range of real-life characters, male and female, from different races and walks of life, using their own words drawn from interviews. Her tactic was the same in her earlier “Fires in the Mirror,” examining the conflict between blacks and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.

In both of those, Smith first performed the shows during the raw aftermath of the events, and she does not consider either of those episodes “over” just because the TV cameras went home long ago. But “House Arrest” is the first show she has presented in the midst of the onslaught of headline news.

In response to these circumstances, Taper officials announced slightly more than a week ago that “House Arrest,” which had been scheduled for a full production at the theater in May and June, instead now will be presented April 9-18 as a work in progress in the form of a 90-minute play followed by a moderated discussion of the issues raised by the performance, in what Taper producer-director Gordon Davidson has called “a community conversation.”

“House Arrest” has been in the works since 1995, when Smith made her first research trip to Washington determined to examine the reality and the myth of the presidency, how the institution has been variously protected and attacked by the press over the years.

“I’m certainly identified with the voice of the unheard and, certainly, the voice that has to do with race in this country,” Smith observed during a Los Angeles visit last week. “And I’m very happy about that, I’m proud of that. But I felt that any serious search for American character would have to deal with whatever is perceived, even at a mythical level, as the center of America. One way I could have done that was to go to the so-called heartland, but I thought I should go to Washington.”

And, she added, the media had to be part of the equation. “It dawned on me that I didn’t know who the president was, except what the press tells me,” she said.

Smith considered, but decided against, postponing her show until the impeachment controversy comes to some resolution. A version of “House Arrest,” in which Smith directs a cast but doesn’t appear herself, was presented in Washington’s Arena Stage in November 1997, before the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted. Critical response was mixed, saying it seemed unfinished. Afterward, Smith plowed through massive rewrites in preparation for the Taper. Finally, however, as each rewrite was upended by a new crisis on the Hill, she and Davidson decided to present “House Arrest” as a work in progress.

Smith noted with a laugh that even history seems to be changing on her. The piece focuses not only on the Clinton presidency, but also those of Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Particularly interested in the historical role of black women in the White House, she had been exploring the storied relationship between Jefferson and his slave and mistress, Sally Hemings, when news reports came out that DNA evidence suggested a link between their descendants. “I’m not only chasing the president, I’m chasing the past,” she observed.

“I guess I’d have to say that I’ve been dedicated to exploring this moment that I’m living in, in the hope that that moment will help me to develop more aesthetically, than if I were only working in the past,” Smith said. “It’s risky, and I’m struggling with it. It’s an experiment that I’m working on.”

She Wants to Hear It Firsthand

In fact, Smith has come to see a certain serendipity in all this. While still serving as a Stanford University professor, Smith also heads up a new think tank at Harvard called the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, exploring ways the arts can “enhance discussion of vital social issues.” The planned post-play conversation at the Taper will serve as a test tube for the concept.

“As an Americanist, and a social scientist, I don’t trust the polls; I want to know for myself,” Smith said. “This is more economical than knocking on doors.” She hopes that the decision to make the audience be the second act will allow the discussion to exist on a higher plane than the usual question-and-answer discussion about how she manages the actor’s trick of inhabiting so many different characters.

As she did in her previous solo shows, Smith is incorporating the results of a massive research project involving interviews with some 300 players. She tracked Clinton on the 1996 campaign trail, and had two private interviews with the president--one off the record and one Oval Office chat that he allowed Smith to tape record. Both took place prior to news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Even though Smith doesn’t appear in the play, she occasionally finds opportunities to portray the president herself, doing excerpts from his speeches when she’s out on the lecture circuit discussing “House Arrest.”

“I love being the president; it’s beautiful, beautiful text, it’s fun to be him. I’ll be doing him today in my speech,” she said, just before heading off to give a talk at Occidental College. “For all that people want to say that he is self-defeating, I think he enjoys himself. My feeling is that he likes life--it is fun to have his words.

“Bush and Carter, too--they have their own style of it. When I interviewed George Bush, he was eating chocolate chip cookies and drinking Orange Crush. Interestingly, the presidents that I interviewed are much freer in their speech than the media people.

“He [Clinton] was as wild and idiosyncratic in his speech as the Lubovitch [a sect of the Hasidic Jews] were in Crown Heights,” she said. “No matter how much we say the president’s performing, or the president’s lying, on the other hand he’s been out there so much that a lot of his barriers, even as he is building them up, are also being broken down. He is a very, very likable man.”

While Smith found a common humanity in the presidents, she found the opposite to be true of the Washington infrastructure. “I was more terrified in Washington, always, than I ever was in South Central,” she said. “Washington is the most marginal community in the country; it is a very closed, specific world made up of people who tell each other the same story, over and over again.”

Smith added that an ordinary citizen finding a voice in that monologue would be as unlikely as a viewer getting the chance to jump onto the screen in an episode of “I Love Lucy.” “They are the discussion, they are the dialogue--and unlike the ‘Lucy’ show, they don’t even have a laugh track,” she said. “They inhabit the whole conflict. There is no room.”

* Tickets for “House Arrest: An Introgression,” running April 9-18 at the Mark Taper Forum, are currently available only to subscribers. Individual tickets go on sale March 21; prices are $25-$15. (213) 628-2772.