Let Me Down Easy: A Meditation on Broken Heartedness

The stage has been set as a stranger’s living room loft, surrounded by a barrier of shrubs and grass. Jazz plays and Anna Deavere Smith has changed costumes once again.

She has transformed into another character, Asgher Rastegar, a physician. She says through his words, “They miss the fact that hopes and dreams are being ravaged by disease. We are treating people. Sometimes we forget it.”

In the pitch black of the audience there is a dark silence and the audience soaks this in. Anna Deavere Smith has become our professor on life and we-the audience-are sponges.

Anna Deavere Smith's newest one-woman show, “Let Me Down Easy” is an exploration of the concepts of regret, death and largely grace through her interviews with real people. From Evangelicals to Harvard professors, Hurricane Katrina survivors and Buddhist Monks, Smith's subjects are a grab bag of people from around the world. The result is a mix of the everyday tragedies-and triumphs- people face and their philosophies that guide them through moments of hardship.

By far the best segments of the play came from the unraveling of complex characters. These moments occurred when a monologue fleshed out the person to reveal deeper layers of human existence and the sometimes-universal aspects of their woes. One character in particular- Ann Richards, a former Texas Governor undergoing chemotherapy-showed an incredible sense of humor in the face of disease and mortality.

A more somber moment involved Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, a physician working at Charity Hospital during Hurricane Katrina. Her experience feeling abandoned by the government was an individual encounter that hinted at the universality of an unfair world.

At one point Kurtz-Burke says, "That was the first time it happened to me...That was new for me being abandoned. For them, it was just one more thing."

Truly heartbreaking.

These were the shining moments-when Anne Deavere Smith's characters break beyond the surface of convention.

Yet oftentimes, however diverse Smith's characters appear to be, they remain a blend of stereotypes. It was neither surprising nor riveting to hear the opinions of a cascade of preachers-from Hazel Merrit an Evangelical, to Peter Gomes, a Reverend-talk about grace when for them it all reflected back to God and faith. To think if these were in fact interviews, she may have gone deeper to the underground truths of these people or perhaps something far less conventional for these characters, instead of treading on the shallow waters of well-established paradigms of religious leaders and professionals.

One of the largest oddities of the play came from Elaine Scarry, Professor of English and Aesthetics and her monologue about flowers. It had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of grace or any other theme in the play. It was jarring in its lack of relatedness to the rest of the performance and was far too banal to be considered meaningful in content. Overall, a real mistake in judgment.

As well, throughout the performance Smith seemed to be chasing the costume changes, the result being that they sometimes detracted from the performance. And although her transformations have been said to be dead on, I found them at times to cross over to parody-and not always at the funny moments either. Her impersonation of Henrietta Mutiuacoarba, a tour guide at the Genocide Memorial, crying was an example of bad overacting and made me feel uncomfortable in its simple terribleness. Both in her application and of her decision to extend it was in painfully poor taste.

"Let Me Down Easy" the title of the play is uttered at the climax of the rendition, as Smith's theologian character associates it with broken love and broken heartedness under disappointment and tragedy.

Indeed, the play speaks about these subjects at length but asks more questions than answers and is unable throughout the performance to properly fuse these thoughts together into a cohesive piece of work.