The actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith has made her name writing and performing in plays such as Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and, most recently, Notes from the Field, which examines the school-to-prison pipeline. To create these plays, she interviews scores of people whose expertise and experience have to do with the subject of her investigation, and then she embodies these characters on stage. For example, for Twilight, she interviewed hundreds of people (public officials, residents, etc.) about the riots that happened in the aftermath of the trial of the LA police officers caught on video beating Rodney King. She then constructed the play with monologues taken from the interview transcripts, and she plays every person herself.
How did this remarkable woman train to be an actress, to inhabit such varied characters? Here’s what she has to say about what reading (and speaking) Shakespeare taught her about character.
I was afraid of many things. I was afraid of heights… But nothing matched my fear of Shakespeare. …Our Shakespeare teacher was like a racehorse waiting at the gate… She told us on the first day about trochees. Most of us had heard of iambic pentameter: BuhDUH buh DUHbuh DUHbuhDUHbuh DUH. …
“Now, a trochee,” she explained, “happens when the iamb goes upside down. So that instead of Buh DUH, you get BUH duh.”
She maintained that if you got a trochee in the second beat, a character was really “losing it” psychologically, and this “loss” made it possible for you to know something about the character, if you wore his or her words.
Losing it is a good thing in that it is a defeat of an imposed rhythmic structure.
The classic example of everything falling to pieces rhythmically as an indicator of a character’s psychological state is King Lear, who says at one point, “Never, never, never, never, never!”
Which is all trochees.
From this idea, I began to see Shakespeare in general as not so frightening at all. I began to perceive him as a jazz musician, who was doing jazz with the given rhythms of his time.
Character, then, seemed to me to be an improvisation on given rhythms. The more successful you were at improvising on language, the more jazz you have, the more likely you could be found in your language…
Our Shakespeare teacher then gave us an assignment: “Go home, take fourteen lines of Shakespeare, and say them over and over again, until something happens.”
— Anna Deveare Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines
When Macbeth hears that his wife has died, he says: “She should have died hereafter. / There would have been time for such a word.” The ten lines that follow comprise one of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies.
These are the lines for you to repeat aloud and try to memorize. (I know, I know — it’s bleak! And yet… well, we’ll talk. In any case, next week, for our last class, we’ll look at a poem that asks us to to look at life in another way entirely.)
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, lines 22–31
Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities Holyoke 