ABSTRACT
Documentary playwright Anna Deavere Smith is a social provocateur and teacher whose contributions to performance and the public sphere shift potential for artists and audiences. Smith’s seminal field project, “On the Road: In Search of an American Character” documents human crises and conditions of our time—urban riot, identity politics, the presidency, and the school to prison pipeline. Each living drama examines “how identities are consolidated and performed in a nation grown increasingly fragmented” (Savran, 1999, 238). Hodde argues that Smith’s verbatim theatre provides a critical antithesis to a distracted age of media spectacle. She frames Smith’s pedagogy as a lively practice with which students embody and confront sociocultural boundaries together, tuning into others’ talk about social crises. Grounded in theories of ethnographic performance as co-participatory, polyvocal discourse, Hodde analyzes civic monologues she assigned to military college students as responses to Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 . In their role as preparing “citizen-soldiers,” her students explore Smith’s praxis as a social vehicle in colliding accounts, and liminal moments that wake them up to others with empathic intent.
