blueprints

38 | anna deavere smith
And so, the cultural scene there was quite like the land. Stunning pockets—
quiet almost—in which people minded their own business in small fiefdoms.
After the unsettled decades before, there was not really a desire to have
it all come together. Perhaps because there would be no coming together
and no language calling anyone to come together (anymore), I and others
were left to find a new language. I chose to have others give me the language.
I went to acting school, where great language already written would
be studied, and where I would learn how to speak that language of others.
And that language, the language of modern playwrights, though it looked
like normal talk—was not normal talk at all. It was heightened speech.
From that point, beginning first with the language of realism, which seemed
like normal talk, we began to build the imaginations and the physical ability
to speak the language of the classics, the language of poetry. We were
also trained to move in that way. It was my mime teacher—the person without
words—who said to me, “Have a rich life, and haiku will come.”
San Francisco was the most diverse community I had ever lived in. I’d
grown up on the East Coast, where diversity meant blacks and whites, or
“Negroes” (as we were then called) and whites, or Negroes (big wall), or
whites (big wall). Inside the white community where Gentiles (big wall)
and Jews. Or inside the Gentiles, Polish (big wall), Italians (big wall), Catholics
(big wall), Lutherans (big wall), and so forth. And inside the Negro
community, educated (big wall) and un-educated or lower-middle-class
poor people (big wall), light-skinned Negroes (big wall) and darker-skinned
Negroes (big wall) or Baptists and Methodists or those who went to Sharp
Street Methodist Church (big wall), those who went to other Methodist
churches, kids who went to private school (biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig wall), the rest of
us who went to public school, and so forth. If people were anything other
than black or white, let’s say Japanese or Indian, they were categorized as
black or just plain “other.” Luckily for me, I went to an all-girl’s public high
school where intellectual desire trumped many of the big walls, and where
there was a space, particularly for those of us who were involved in student
government, to create a community that was not divided by the walls. I
really loved that. This tangible possibility perhaps inspired me on some level
to do the kind of work I do today.
I set about studying everything I could about acting and about how an
actor’s imagination could potentially work—which meant dutifully practicing
my Shakespeare monologues every single day, no matter what, to see
what the Bard understood and exemplified about language and psychology.