By Nelson Pressley
The Washington Post
Friday, January 21, 2011; 2:00 PM
Long before the reality-TV craze took off, there was Anna Deavere Smith, the virtuoso mimic who carried her tape recorder into riot minefields to create "Fires in the Mirror" (about New York's Crown Heights conflict in 1991) and "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" (exploring the Rodney King beating and aftermath). Already a decade into her work then, Smith was a pioneer in terms of creating "documentary" theater. Aside from writer-director Emily Mann's "theater of testimony," which included "Execution of Justice" - at Arena Stage and then on Broadway in the mid-1980s, and dealing with Harvey Milk's assassination - Smith had few peers to emulate or models to work from.
Twenty years later, behold the burgeoning docudrama field. Examples of this surprisingly flexible form include "The Exonerated" (about death row inmates wrongly convicted) and journalist Lawrence Wright's solo stage forays ("My Trip to Al-Qaeda" in 2005, "The Human Scale" in Manhattan last fall). There's also Eve Ensler's perpetually performed "The Vagina Monologues," based on interviews. And there's Doug Wright's PulitzerPrize- and Tony Award-winning "I Am My Own Wife," which put facts up for grabs as the playwright rooted through documents and his own provocative interviews with a slippery East German transvestite who survived World War II.
"Some of the work has been very, very impactful," says Moises Kaufman, who directed "I Am My Own Wife" on Broadway. "These are works that over the last decade have been among the most performed plays in America."
The verbatim wave is hitting a high tide now at major Washington area theaters. Smith is holding forth at Arena Stage with "Let Me Down Easy" - a meditation on health, health care and death, drawn from 320 interviews and performed with her trademark panache as she impersonates doctors, patients and celebrities (Lance Armstrong, Ann Richards and others, including Ensler). . . .
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