"Is Race a Trope?": Anna Deavere Smith and the question of racial performativity.

"Is race a trope?" Anna Deavere Smith's performances not only ask but embody this question. They also ask another, equally important question: "Who is asking?"

Anna Deavere Smith is an African American performance artist known for her technique of interviewing subjects, particularly on matters of race, and then recreating her subjects' responses with a difference on-stage. She has recently gained tremendous popularity for her work Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, part of her larger project "On the Road: A Search for American Character." The question in my title, "Is Race a Trope?", comes, however, not from me or from Anna Deavere Smith per se but from a performance of Smith's in which she recreates an interview she conducted with academic and critical theorist Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. (1) Early in the development of her technique of interviewing and then performing people of diverse races, ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions, Anna Deavere Smith performed an edited interview she'd conducted with Smith-Rosenberg, who asks and explores the question "Is race a trope?" The answer to this question for Smith-Rosenberg is complex, and Anna Deavere Smith's performance of Smith-Rosenberg's answer is even more complex. Not only do both social theorists say that identity, in this case racial identity, is experienced as both a fact and as a trope, but Anna Deavere Smith incorporates this post-structuralist model of racial identity into her acting approach. The question "Is race a trope?" is all the more interesting when it is asked in the context of a black woman (Smith), playing a white woman (Smith-Rosenberg), asking the question of the black woman who is now playing her.

First, however, to get to the question of race as a trope, and how Anna Deavere Smith has developed an acting technique that can embrace the complexity of this question. I want to move back to the context of current acting practices, and then forward again into Anna Deavere Smith's interventions into approaches to racial identity and character in theater.

What I am calling Anna Deavere Smith's post-structuralist acting practices arose not out of her engagement with post-structuralist race theory but out of her frustration with acting based in "psychological realism" (Fires xxvi). While poststructuralist models of identity--notions of identity as "performative"--have become almost dogma in current literary theory, acting practice in the U.S. has been slow to reflect this shift in models of identity, and is still very much based in liberal humanism. Although anti-Naturalistic traditions, which have been quite strong in European drama, have always had a presence in American drama (in forms such as expressionism, surrealism, even camp and neo-melodrama), the preponderant mode has remained firmly a Naturalistic one.

There have, of course, been many notable exceptions to Naturalistic theater in the U.S. Some prominent ones include The Living Theatre of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the work of Joseph Chaikin and Roberta Sklar and the Open Theatre, El Teatro Campesino's Boal-influenced people's theatre, Richard Schechner's Environmental Theatre approaches, the Wooster Croup, the campy, postmodem productions of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater and of the WOW Cafe, and many other experimental and avant-garde theaters. (2) The most immediate precursor to Anna Deavere Smith's work is that of Adrienne Kennedy, whose 1964 Funnyhouse of a Negro takes a highly post-structuralist, anti-Naturalistic approach to character and identity, (3) and whose A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, which Smith directed in 1980, Smith credits as the beginning of her non-Naturalistic approach to personae and psychic life (Tate 198). Interestingly, the European anti-Naturalistic form that is most clearly a precursor to post-structuralist theater -- Brechtian alienation and Epic Theater--has had very little presence in American drama, and particularly in mainstream (Broadway and off-Broadway) theater, as can be seen in actors' training approaches.

The preponderant philosophy underlying acting approaches taught in the U.S. remains one of liberal humanism. The majority of actors' training programs in North America continue to operate in variations of the Stanislavsky approach (or its American incarnation, Method Acting), which views human nature as transcultural and transhistorical, and views a character's identity as having an essential core of interior objectives and the character's (or actor's) bodily acts as the outward manifestations of the character's interior identity. The "Naturalistic" Acting Approach varies from the versions of Stanislavsky himself to those of, for example, Uta Hagen, Sanford Meisner, Eric Morris, and William H. Macy and David Mamet. As different as these various commonly taught approaches seem to be, all believe that human nature is universal, and that the essence of acting is to uncover the human spirit, to bring out the universal in the specifics of human life. For example, the Practical Handbook for the Actor states that "t he world needs theatre and the theatre needs actors who will bring the truth of the human soul to the stage" (Bruder et al. 7), and Hagen states that "internal" (or Naturalistic) acting "can become as timeless as human experience itself" (13).

Because of the belief that all human beings share a common nature or soul, and that this commonality matters more than individual differences, actor and character can and should, in Naturalistic acting, connect through a shared human nature. Hence distinctions between the actor and the character, in Naturalistic acting, should disappear for the audience and become minimized (to varying degrees) for the actor. All of these differing Naturalistic acting approaches posit an "inner core" or "truth" or "essence" to a character, which houses a "through-line" or "super-objective" and other subsidiary "objectives." Furthermore, though these approaches differ on the degree to which the actor should "become" or "be" the character he/she is playing, all agree that the character is built up from the "instincts," "impulses," "common sense," and "truth" of the actor. Mamet says that "your greatest gift as an artist [is] your sense of truth" (Bruder et al. x) and that, as an actor, you must "follow the truth you feel in you rself" and "follow your common sense" (xi). Uta Hagen stipulates that "your own identity and self-knowledge are the main sources for any character you may play. Most human emotions have been experienced by each of us by the time we are eighteen, just as they have been by all human beings throughout the ages" (29). She continues: "Once we are on the track of self-discovery in terms of an enlargement of our sense of identity, and we now try to apply this knowledge to an identification with the character in the play, we must make this transference, this finding of the character within ourselves, through a continuing and overlapping series of substitutions from our own experiences and remembrances, through the use of imaginative extension of realities, and put them in the place of the fiction in the play' (34). Sanford Meisner likewise observes that he is "a very nonintellectual teacher of acting. My approach is based on bringing the actor back to his emotional impulses and to acting that is firmly rooted in the instinctive. It is based on the fact that all good acting comes from the heart, as it were, and that there's no mentality in it. (37) For Eric Morris, "The actor's fundamental question is: 'What is the reality and how can I make it real to me?' In this kind of training the actor discovers himself fully both on stage and off..." (1). As several of these quotes suggest, there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in most North American acting approaches, which, as I will show, Anna Deavere Smith's work counters.

An actor, in the Naturalistic approach, identifies with her character and her character's emotions by recalling her own reserves of emotionally rich and emotion-triggering memories (Hagen) or by imagining him- or herself in given circumstances (Meisner). Uta Hagen offers the example of an actor playing Desdemona in the murder scene:

... I should see that I want to cope with a foreboding of an unspecified disaster. I want to rid myself of a sense of mounting terror. As illogical as it may sound, I can use an experience of waiting in a hospital room prior to surgery, even a dentist's office prior to a tooth extraction. The fears that rush in on me are larger and less static than some fictional, preconceived fear for a Desdemona. (40)

Or, if the action is "making a friend take the plunge," the actor may use "it's as if I'm making my sister Mary go back to college" (Bruder et al. 79). The fear or pleading on-stage, then, will not be "manufactured" (or "indicated") but "real." Hence, in the Naturalistic approach, "acting is being."

One problem with this kind of striving for authenticity in performance is that it is based in the actor's self; it is "self-oriented." Because the characters represented must remain within the emotional and experiential range of the actor, the range of identities and emotions possible for the character are constrained by the much more limited range of identities and emotions actually experienced and already known or at least imaginable (through the "magic if" or "as-if") by the actor. Furthermore, fundamental to a post-structuralist critique of liberal humanist models of identity is the belief that ideology and ideological state apparati (including the arts) create "common sense" or "obviousness" or "believability." Ideological state apparati make us experience ideological structures as deeply personal, natural, and instinctive. The way the actor's emotions and identities are experienced, then, will (in a post-structuralist model) be very much embedded in the ideological situations of the actors, but will be presented as "impulsive," "instinctive," "natural," "the truth of human nature." Naturalism, in other words, naturalizes ideology.

This "naturalistic" approach to acting in North America is, I suggest, one of an array of reasons that the institution of theater, although full of left-leaning, politically radical people, remains for the most part extremely conservative in its envisioning of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual realities-and more importantly of potential realities not yet created.

Smith, by contrast, is determined to encourage "other-oriented" rather than "self-based" approaches to acting (Fires Xxvii). Instead of "finding the character within ourselves" (as Uta Hagen puts it), actors should look for the character outside of themselves. Instead of building a character from the inside out, actors should build the character from the outside in. While "a basic tenet of psychological realism is that characters live inside of you and that you create a character through a process of realizing your own similarity to the character," Smith is developing "a technique that would begin with the other and come to the self" (Fires xxvi-xxvii). In Smith's acting approach, the distinction between actor and character remains decisively intact. Smith says that, in performance, she's "there intellectually and never go[es] away intellectually. Some actors would say you should go away intellectually, but I'm always there" (Tate 201). The goal of performance becomes, then, not authenticity but exploration o f the gap between self and other, actor and character, as well as of the gaps within our seemingly linear ideological narratives.

Of her experience directing Kennedy's Movie Star, Smith says:

... it was white actors having to do this black stuff and still be Bette Davis. So then I just began to tear apart in my own thinking all the things that build personae and psychic life. Which I had never really believed in anyway. I sorta disliked the traditional way I had been taught that everything comes from inside. That for me to be any character it has to come from me, Anna, and my life.... So I had this opportunity to take apart that thing and not assume anymore that this [pointing to her gut] had a direct line to this [pointing to her head]. (Tate 198)

Here Smith's approach to character resembles a Brechtian and incipiently post-structuralist mode. In Brechtian theater, the actor must never "go so far as to be wholly transformed into the character played .... [The actor's] feelings must not at bottom be those of the character, so that the audience's may not at bottom be those of the character either" (Brecht 193-94). This detachment of actor from character is important to Brechtian acting because Brecht, like most Marxists and post-Marxists, believed that "human nature" is not universal or transhistorical, but is historically specific and socially constructed. Theater should, then, take an historical approach to character and to the human condition, even in its portrayal of the present. Rather than naturalizing a character's conduct, Brechtian theater "leads real conduct to acquire an element of 'unnaturalness,' thus allowing the real motive forces to be shorn of their naturalness and become capable of manipulation" (Brecht 191). Such a theatrical process c onstitutes Brecht's famous "Alienation Effect": "A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.... The new alienations are only designed to free socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today" (192). Theatrical alienation "treats social situations as processes, and traces out all their inconsistencies" (193), and inconsistencies in individual and cultural identities present sites for denaturalization, intervention, and change. Hence "contradictions are our hope!" (Brecht 47).

A brief example of Smith's Brechtian techniques can help illustrate her difference from Naturalist theater and humanist philosophy. In the 'Seven Verses" piece in Fires, Smith performs the Minister Conrad Mohammed being interviewed by herself. What gets emphasized in this piece, particularly in its performance, is not how Conrad Mohammed can be seen as a local and specific example of the universal human struggle for identity and for justice, but how Mohammed is a subject of a complex and conflicted historical moment which marks him with its contradictions. Indeed, even as Mohammed argues for a pan-African (or at least Afrocentric) cultural identity, the performance suggests the opposite. Mohammed contrasts "the total subjugation of the Black man" with other forms of physical suffering:

You can go into Bangladesh today,
Calcutta,
(He strikes the table with a sugar packet
   three or four times)
New Delhi,
Nigeria,
Some really
So-called underdeveloped nation,
And I don't care how low that person's
 humanity is
(He opens the sugar packet)
whether they never
had running water,
if they'd never seen a television or any-
   thing.
They are in better condition than the
   Black man and woman
In America today
Right now.
Even at Harvard.
They have a contextual understanding
   of what identity is.
(He strikes the fable with another sugar
   packet three or four times and opens it.)
But the Black man has no knowledge
   of that;
He's an amnesia victim.
(Starts stirring his coffee)
He has lost knowledge of himself
(Stirring his coffee)
and he's living a beast life.
(Stirring his coffee)
So this proves that it was the greatest
   crime.
Because we were cut off from our past.
   (Fires 55-56) (4)

Smith emphasizes, even alienates, Mohammed's consumption of sugar and beverage--which in performance could read as coffee or tea. His/her aggressive stirring and striking of sugar packets constitutes a Brechtian "social gest." Coffee, tea, and sugar were not only goods whose production historically depended on slavery, but they continue to be goods produced (predominantly) by people of color under slave-like conditions. Mohammed unwittingly participates in the very condition he condemns, even as he condemns it. But Smith's performance does not suggest hypocrisy on Mohammed's part; rather, it illustrates the complexity of our historical moment, in which oppression of people of color is so global and so naturalized that we can't see it unless it is aggressively alienated for us. Indeed, it may be impossible, particularly for people of color in our current postmodern, multinational-corporation-driven, systemically racist but allegedly equal American culture, to speak and act with a unitary voice and a solid and consistent core.

Related to the notion of a solid and consistent core is humanistic or "Naturalistic" acting's model of identity as "deep," not superficial. The Naturalistic mantra that "acting is being" is rooted in the liberal humanist belief in a true, core self, from which all doing and perceiving springs. Morris states that you can't "teach a person to act if he isn't connected to his inner self" (2). Sensory choices (or sense memories) become more true and real when they "touch the nucleus of the individual self" (3). True Being is prior to acting. The individual self antedates, in this model, all senses and actions that it experiences. In other words, identity in the humanist model is something you have; what you do is always a secondary reflection of a preexisting, interior identity. The Macy/Mamet method would, at first glance, seem to be the exception to this model, for this approach accords with Aristotle's notion that dramatic "character" is defined as "the sum total of an individual's actions" (74). "To act means to do," it posits, "so you must always have something specific to do onstage or you will immediately stop acting" (Bruder et al. 13). But even with this approach's insistence that acting is doing, and that character is action, it posits a prior self-hood to the actor's actions:

The reason great actors are so compelling is that they have the courage to bring their personalities to bear on everything they do. Don't ever play a part as someone else would play it. Remember that it is you onstage, not some mythical being called the character. For your purposes, the character exists on the printed page for analysis only.... You have the right and the responsibility to bring to the stage who you are. Your humanity is an absolutely vital contribution to any play you act in. (75)

The actor, then, has an identity, even as he/she does a character. Furthermore, there is a radical distinction in this Naturalistic acting approach between the way characters are created and the way our own human identities are created.

Brechtian, post-Marxist, and post-structuralist models of identity would posit just the opposite. In the work of Judith Butler, for example (an example which can well serve as a synecdoche for a whole body of work on post-structuralist models of identity), identities are radically theatrical and performative, constituted by repeated poses, postures, acts, and gestures. (5) For Butler, "theatricality" is a phenomenon of daily life and is indeed the phenomenon by which "exteriority" becomes "interior" identity. Butler's work focuses on gender identity in particular, but could apply, with modifications, to racial, ethnic, sexual, and other identities as well. Butler asserts that a gender is by no means a transcultural or transhistorical identity, or even an identity stable within a given culture, climate, or body; it is, rather, "an identity tenuously constituted in time--an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts" ("Performative" 519). Through repetition, the performances of gender and other i dentities are legitimated, much like in ritual social drama. (6) The gendered acts that one performs are not self-generated (indeed, the acts generate the "self"). The ideal of an innate, coherent identity, indeed, is an effect of performance which erases its own performativity: "Gender reality is performative which means...that it is real only to the extent that it is performed" ("Performative" 527). In other words, gender identity--or any other kind of identity--is not something that you have, but something that you do--or, at least, something that you have "only" by doing it again and again and again.

And this notion that identity--in our case, racial and ethnic identity--is not something there, but something constantly made and remade, holds out the potential for change. When an assigned identity is not re-cited and reperformed perfectly, then that identity can shift. Resistant or subversive performative repetitions, always done, of course, under surveillance and the threat of potentially severe punishment, are nevertheless possible. The subject produced through performative reiteration of norms can also somewhat re-perform those norms with a difference, and even, potentially, constitute performative identities not yet normalized or even scripted or embodied.

For Anna Deavere Smith, racial identity is radically performative, so what interests her as an actor is a person's struggle within and against scripts. When interviewing subjects to represent as characters, she tries "to create an atmosphere in which the interviewee would experience his/her own authorship" (Fires xxxi).

Character, or identity, lies not in a preexisting essence but in the process of self-authorship:

... everyone, in a given amount of time, will say something that is like poetry. The process of getting to that poetic moment is where "character" lives.... The pursuit is frequently filled with uhs and urns and, in fact, the wrong words, if any words at all, and almost always what would be considered "bad grammar." I suppose much of communication could be narrowed down to "the point." This project is not about a point, it is about a route. It is on the road. Character lives in the linguistic road as well as the destination. (Fires xxxi-xxxii)

Smith believes that American character "lives not in what has been fully articulated, but in what is in the process of being articulated, not in the smooth-sounding words, but in the very moment that the smooth-sounding words fail us" (Fires xli). That is, character is alive in those moments of performance with a difference, in which scripts and performative acts are in the process of shifting, if ever so slightly. So Smith is interested not in what is consistent about a subject, but in what is radically inconsistent. She focuses in on the internal contradictions in characters, on the evidence of "fault lines."

In pursuing the relationship between language and character, Smith started with a statement made by her grandfather. During her days of classical actor training, she remembered her grandfather's statement as "If you say a word often enough it becomes your own" (Fires xxiii). Later, she learned that her grandfather's statement actually was "If you say a word often enough it becomes you." This difference--between words becoming your own and words becoming you--is the difference between humanist and post-structuralist models of acting and, indeed, of selfhood. If words become your own, there is a "you" pre-existing the words; but if words become "you," then your "you-ness," your very selfhood, is made up of your interaction with words. Or, turned around, you become you by saying words. Identity isn't "there"; it's "always being negotiated" (Fires xxxiii).

Subsequent to this realization, Smith moved her acting approach from individual to communal or social levels. To explore community identities, she went to communities in crisis, most notably Crown Heights (New York) and Los Angeles, just after a major, racially inflected uprising in each city. In Smith's interviews with members of these post-uprising communities, while one character might assert his or her "true" racial identity, other characters radically question the "truth" of identity categories, particularly based on race. While some individual characters may try to fit their senses of self-identity (particularly racial/ethnic identity) into essentialist models, the very format of the performance pieces itself resists such models--an African American woman playing African American men, Hasidic Jewish men and women, a Korean grocer, Jamaican immigrants, hip hop artists, and many other identities quite different from her own. If Brecht implicitly, and Judith Butler explicitly, argues that identities are no t fixed things that you have, but things that you do, Anna Deavere Smith's acting approach incarnates this model by making identities not nouns but verbs, actions, self-activations.

Another way of saying that racial identity, for Anna Deavere Smith, is radically performative would be to say that race is a trope. And this idea is precisely what one of her interviewees, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, suggests:

In other words,
It's people who are trying to address
 the old Marxist paradigm
of infrastructure being the real stuff
and superstructure being things like
 language and literature,
and saying, uh but wait a second,
language is tied in with that.
How do you define sexuality?
How do you find--how do you define
 race?
And gender and race become then I
 think emblematic of this.
How do you think of this?
Is race a trope?
Uh, to what extent is it real?
Um, if you're saying, that it's a social
 construction and therefore a trope,
do you lose some of your political uh
 uh uh uh uh talk?
Uh uh uh so uh how do you hang
 on--because if it's if it's a construction
and and and and and then it's not real,
 then it's just a fantasy.
So how can you hang onto the concept
 of a social construction
and still maintain the reality of gender
 and race as political uh uh uh forces.
And so these would be some of the
 ways in which uh which some of the
 ways
that which which could then be more
 generally stated as
what is the relationship between lan-
 guage and and and power.
And we would be saying we would be
 saying (sips drink)
that there is a hegemonical discourse
 which very few people mostly white
 males construct.
And there are a variety of other social
 dialects
and you can in fact speak more than
 one dialect at the same time.
We in academia have to speak the
 hegemonical discourse in order to
 survive.
How does this affect us? How does
 this affect
the discourses themselves?
How can we in fact corrupt and co-opt
 the eh corrupt uh
how in fact does the hegemonical dis-
 course in fact corrupt and co-opt us?
These would some of uh be some of
 the issues that we are very very
 concerned about--
How this eh works
in our lives ("Identities")

I take it that the "it" of the second line is a field of scholarship applying postMarxist and post-structuralist approaches to racial, gender, and sexual identity. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg seems to be explaining to Anna Deavere Smith how post-structuralist theory applies to our understanding of everyday performances of race and gender. Many of Anna Deavere Smith's interview-based performance pieces follow this pattern: They begin by inhabiting and poking gentle fun at the discourse the subject is occupying, then find the moments in which the subject struggles within and against this discourse, and then come to a moment where the subject-discourse interaction reaches "poetry."7 That is certainly the pattern in this piece.

Smith-Rosenberg's language falters a bit when she asks, "How do you find--how do you define race?" While she intends to ask, "How do you define race," she initially utters the word find. Though Smith-Rosenberg corrects herself, Anna Deavere Smith's performance of Smith-Rosenberg preserves the tension between race as something to "find and face" and as something to "define"--a tension reflecting the conflicting models of race as something already there, waiting to be uncovered, and race as something to be constructed. This "slip of the tongue" is not a Freudian slip; it does not reveal the repressed, unconscious material of the individual character's unique, "true self." If Smith-Rosenberg's "slip" reveals an unconscious at all, it is a political unconscious. Her tongue hits on anxieties and contradictions in American culture's search for racial identity.

Some of Smith-Rosenberg's struggles with language are outright funny. For instance, her struggle to find the word talk, when asking, "If you're saying, that it's a social construction and therefore a trope, / do you lose some of your political uh uh uh uh uh talk?" unwittingly and amusingly embodies its point. But the question, and the struggle for language embedded within it, embodies a very serious question. Likewise, while it is very funny that Smith-Rosenberg, like me, speaks a very dense, multi-syllabic, academic discourse under the name of speaking of and for the people and daily life, she also has profound moments of absolute clarity. "Is race a trope?"--a question enabled by (and perhaps only formulatable in) post-structuralist academicspeak, but all in monosyllables--gets at, I think, a fundamental question of our time. What does it mean to say that race is--or isn't--real? What's at stake with this claim? Who is empowered by it, and under what conditions?

Anna Deavere Smith, in her performance of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, embodies Smith-Rosenberg's question. rhisf is not "color-blind casting." Anna Deavere Smith does not wear make-up or manipulate lighting to appear to be the white woman she is portraying. In Eact, Smith accentuates the difference--racial and other--between herself and her subjects. That a black woman is playing a white woman is part of the meaning of the piece. Unlike Naturalistic acting, in which Anna Deavere Smith would "become" Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and unlike the philosophy of color-blind casting, in which the race of the actor has no bearing on the race or meaning of the character, here Anna Deavere Smith's self-conscious and self-reflexive portrayal of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg embodies the questions being discussed: Is race innate? a mere act? a social construct? a lived reality? Can race be transgressed? transcended? reproduced? There's a crucial tension here: On the one hand, Anna Deavere Smith can clearly perform, recreate, embody, inhabit, "become" another race. On the other hand, she is just as clearly an African American woman playing a white woman--and even if we "blind" ourselves to her "color," we are recreating her race by the very act of consciously and conscientiously blinding ourselves to it. It is this tension that Smith-Rosenberg explains and Anna Deavere Smith embodies simultaneously.

Many people, and particularly white, middle-class liberal humanists, want passionately to believe in and practice color-blind casting both onstage and in daily life. They want to believe that race is a "mere" construct, and if we stop reconstructing it, it will go away. That, for them, is a good thing, for if race is only a matter of individual identity, then it is not a systemic problem. And, of course, at this point in U.S. history, white people--and white supremacy--have more to gain by ignoring race than by seeing it. Ignoring race enables white folks to escape the label "prejudiced" and, at the same time, avoid dealing with the very real problem of systemic racism in the American economy. Thus, liberal humanists often hear in Smith-Rosenberg's piece that race is not real--it's a trap--and are puzzled by what they see as the "reverse racism" of African Americans who insist on their own black identity. In the same "On the Road" project in which Anna Deavere Smith performs Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's "Is Race a Trope?", she also performs the African American playwright and director George C. Wolfe, author of The Colored Museum and director of Smith's own work. And her Wolfe emphatically rejects the notion that race is a trope that mutually constructs notions of "blackness" and "whiteness":

I am not going to place myself
in relationship to your whiteness.
We can talk about your whiteness if
  you want to talk about that.
But my blackness does not
  resis--ex--re--
exist in relationship to your whiteness.
It is not in relationship to--
it exists.
It exists.
And like I said, I come from a very
  complex,
confused,
neu-rotic,
sometimes self-destructive reality,
but it is a reality complete unto itself.
And then you're white.
And uh like I said uh I
am not gonna defend
the the the the the uh uh define uh
my blackness according to your whiteness
because my blackness is once again
it is a it is it is
complex,
uh demonic,
it's ridiculous,
it's absurd,
it's all the stuff.
And that's what I found so fascinating
  about people's reaction to Colored
  Museum.
Because how could I say these things
  about black people and not be uh
  be saying
white is better?...
And that's what I found real real real
  real real real real fascinating.
And what that told me was the shit
  that they were accusing me of is
alive and well and blooming
and they water it and tend to it daily
  with their own shit.
And they do not want to set uh accept
  responsibility for it
so once again
they put the responsibility back on me.
Because uh by confronting their own
  stuff, it makes them feel small.
But, I mean, I have major demons, but
  that is none of the--
that that this uh nah that eh nah nah
Black is
where my extraordinariness is.
And that is what I found so extraordi-
  narily
confusing.

Wolfe's tongue, too, has trouble articulating the word define, but instead of confusing it with find, he confuses it with defend. For Smith-Rosenberg, finding race and defining race form a dialectal and confusing relationship. For Wolfe, defining blackness and defending blackness are both synonymous and distinctly different activities. Similarly, when Smith represents Wolfe attempting to assert that his blackness exists independently of whiteness, she shows his tongue offering resist for exist. Racial identity, in Smith's piece, is much more of an embattled site of defense and resistance for the black theatre artist than it is for the white academic. With whiteness looming in Wolfe's thoughts and later in his sentence, resistance comes simultaneous with--or rather prior to--existence. Even as Wolfe asserts the lack of relationship between black identity and whiteness, Smith's performance of Wolfe's assertion also suggests the opposite. Wolfe's "slip," revealing the performative resistance of black identity to whiteness, prior to the assertion of blackness's independent existence, seemingly contradicts Wolfe's powerful statement, but without taking away the power of that statement. Again, this "slip" reveals not the individual anxieties of Wolfe's true but unconscious self; rather, it reveals cultural struggles and contradiction around the status and experiences of race in America.

Even more fundamentally, blackness, for Wolfe, is not merely a trope: black is. Amidst all the confusion about racial discourse, both in Wolfe's monologue and around him--amidst all the slips of the tongue, the uhs, the ums, the "that that this uh nah that eh nah nah"--one statement is profoundly clear: "Black is." (In the transcription on paper, the line is a sentence: "Black is where my extraordinariness is." But in performance, Smith delivers the line with tremendous emphasis on the word is, and with a significant pause after the is, so that "Black is" becomes its own emphatic, self-contained sentence.) And a very essentialist statement it is. Is George C. Wolfe less sophisticated in his post-structuralist theory than Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is? One look at his play The Colored Museum--beyond the scope of this current paper--would suggest otherwise. Rather, I would argue that, at the very same moment when it is politically progressive for a white woman to consider that race may be a trope, it is politicall y progressive for a black man to argue that "Black is." That is, the important socio-cultural work of our current political moment is to historicize, to de-mystify whiteness--to see whiteness as trope and construct-and at the same time to insist on the very real ways in which racial identity has congealed under conditions of oppression. While oppressed communities need to unite in pride, pride in the very identity formed within conditions of oppression, privileged communities need to understand, first, that they are indeed privileged and, second, privileged through a system of racism that should no longer be ignored. For whites in America, in other words, one of the greatest parts of white privilege is not having to recognize white privilege as white privilege. Whites have the luxury of denying that race is, whether ontologically grounded or not. Smith's acting approach embraces both sides of this double bind: She brings out of George C. Wolfe's interview two simultaneous views: That racial identify is plural , confusing, absurd, self-contradictory, and that racial identity is--that it is a non-dialectical essence, extraordinary and singular. Wolfe's answer, then, is also double--race both is and is not a trope. And in the act of racial identification we all need both to insist on the historical categories for racial identity so deeply embedded in American economic structures and to disturb and displace them.

In Fires in the Mirror, interviewee Angela Davis argues this point with the figure of a rope:

I am tentative about race
but I am not tentative about racism....
I think we need to develop
new ways of looking at community.
Race in the old sense
has become an increasingly obsolete
 way
of constructing community
because it is based on immutable bio-
 logical
facts
in a pseudo-scientific way.
Now this does not mean that we
 ignore
racism.
Racism is at the origins of this concept
 of race.
It's not the other way around....
As a matter of fact
in order for European colonialists
to attempt
to conquer the world,
to colonize the world,
they had to construct this notion
of
the populations of the earth being
 divided into certain
firm biological
communities,
and that's what I think we have to go
 back and consider.
So when I use the word "race" now I
 put it in quotations.
Because if we don't transform
this intransigent
rigid
notion of race,
we will be caught up in this cycle
of genocidal
violence
that
is at the origins of our history.
So I think...
that we have to find different ways of
 coming together....
I'm not suggesting that we do not
 anchor ourselves in our communities;
I feel very anchored in
my various communities.
But I think that,
to use a metaphor, the rope
attached to that anchor should be long
enough to allow us to move
into other communities,
to understand and learn.

Angela Davis puts "race" in quotation marks, because it is, in a sense, a trap--a trap constructed by and upholding racism. And yet racism cannot simply be done away with by deeming the concept of race as a mere trap that we shouldn't fall into, and that we can avoid by not invoking "race." Race is a very real identity category which has become systemic, so to ignore race would be to allow systemic racism to continue as it is. But to live in rigid categories of race also only re-enmeshes them, and constrains us from imagining other possible identity categories and communities, much like the Realist actor is constrained within already existing constructs of reality.

For theatre to capture racial and other identities in our current cultural moment, we need an other-oriented acting approach of the kind that Anna Deavere Smith is attempting to develop, which can present race as simultaneously both anchored and mobile, both fact and act, both trap and trope. By approaching racial identity as performative, Anna Deavere Smith can question the fact of race without discounting racism's very real effects.

Notes

(1.) Anna Deavere Smith, "Identities, Mirrors and Distortions." The transcription is mine.

(2.) For a good overview of Experimental theater in the U.S. from 1955 to 1983, see McNamara and Dolan.

(3.) For a discussion of Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro as offering a post-structuralist model of character and identity, see my "Reversing Blackface Minstrelsy, Improvising Racial Identity."

(4.) This quotation is taken from the published text The words in the PBS production of Fires in the Mirror vary slightly.

(5.) See Judith Butler, "Performative Acts," Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech. For more discussion on identity as "performative," see Parker and Sedgwick.

(6.) On ritual social drama, see Turner.

(7.) Tania Modleski sees it more as a dialectic than a pattern of movement: "... Smith's work brilliantly oscillates between these two modes of repetition: repetition in the form of mimetic rivalry, rooted in envy and anger, and repetition as a transformative process, yielding complex surprises and illustrating how repetition is always repetition with a difference" (65).

Works Cited

Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans. and ed. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.

Bruder. Melissa, Lee Michael Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler. A Practical Handbook for the Actor. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

---. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997

---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. 1990.

---. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 270-82.

Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting. With Haskel Frankel. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

McNamara, Brooks, and Jill Dolan, eds. The Drama Review: Thirty Years of Commentary on the Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, P, 1986.

Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Vintage, 1987.

Modleski, Tania. "Doing Justice to the Subjects--Mimetic Art in a Multicultural Society: The Work of Anna Deavere Smith." Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Ed. Barbara Christian, Elizabeth Abel, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: U of California P. 1997. 57-76.

Morris, Eric, and Joan Hotchkis. No Acting Please. New York: Perigee. 1979.

Parker, Andrew, and Eve K. Sedgwick, eds. Performativitiy and Performance: Essays from the English Institute. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights. Brooklyn and Other Identities. New York: Anchor. 1993.

---. "Identities, Mirrors and Distortions." On the Road: A Search for American Character. Written, directed, and performed by Smith. Curated and produced by George C. Wolfe. New York: New York Shakespeare Festival's "Moving Beyond the Madness: A Festival of New Voices." Recorded 12 Dec. 1991.

---. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Tate, Greg. "Bewitching the Other: In Fires in the Mirror, Anna Deavere Smith Wears Her Words.' Village Voice 12 July 1992:198-201.

Thompson, Deborah. "Reversing Blackface Minstrelsy, Improvising Racial Identity: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro." Post-Identity 1.1 (1997): 13-38.

Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.

---. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982.

Wolfe, George C. The Colored Museum. New York: Grove P, 1988.

Debby Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University, where she teaches classes In Modem Drama Literary Theory, and Multicultural Literature. She is currently completing a book entitled Casting Suspicions: Race. Identity and Politics in Contemporary American Theater. The book studies the ways contemporary performances and theater practices both participate in and interrogate American racial constructions in an era of post-identity politics.