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Degree

Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Theatre, 2005.

Abstract

This dissertation examines playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith’s critically acclaimed series, On the Road: A Search for American Character. Focusing on the project’s thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth installments, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992, and House Arrest: A Search for American Character In and Around the White House, Past and Present, respectively, this study demonstrates how diversity and doubleness serve as the foundation of Smith’s dramaturgical investigation into the relationship between language and character. Smith focuses on communities experiencing socio-political duress and persons whose voices have gone largely unheard within those communities. In collecting, editing, and performing verbatim excerpts from interviews with white, African American, Korean, Latino, and Jewish women and men, Smith’s interest in cultural diversity plays a crucial role in fulfilling the mission of On the Road: to make connections between the seemingly disconnected and spark productive discussion about matters of race. Characters in Smith’s dramas regularly reveal a sense of double consciousness, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois’s influential concept, grappling with their awareness of themselves as racial minorities and how their identities are viewed as “other” by the dominant culture. Furthermore, many events upon which the plays are based are shown to have double meanings and be open to a wide range of interpretation. The same holds true for the imperfect but poetic language employed by characters to describe these events. By presenting a panoply of voices and exploring events from multiple perspectives, Smith investigates how and why disagreements, tensions, failures to understand, and inabilities to communicate have plagued the diverse populations of Crown Heights, Los Angeles, and the United States. This dissertation also explores how Smith’s multiple identities as African American, woman, interviewer, playwright, and actor complicate her staged representations of character and are essential to reading her work in production. Finally, it examines the plays’ production histories and critical response, weighing the consequences of how critics did and did not take into account arguably the most important character of all in On the Road: Smith herself.

Subject Headings

Theater

Keywords

Anna Deavere Smith; Female Playwrights; Theatre; Documentary Theatre; Solo Performance; American Identity; Diversity; Race; Crown Heights Riots; Los Angeles Riots

Advisor

Joy Harriman Reilly

Pages

287p.

Document number: osu1117221328
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1117221328

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