Play Club: Let Me Down Easy
Program Description
We are delighted to announce that our November edition of Play Club, where members and our artistic team discuss the plays close to our heart, will be held on Wednesday, November 10 at 7:00 PM EDT.
About the Play
Hosted by leaders of our artistic team, Play Club is a journey through the pages of incredible dramas. This November we are opening the bind of Let Me Down Easy. Anna Deveare Smith examines the miracle of human resilience through the lens of the national debate on health care. After collecting interviews with over 300 people on three continents, Smith creates an indelible gallery of 20 individuals, known and unknown—from a rodeo bull rider and a World Heavyweight boxing champion to a New Orleans doctor during Hurricane Katrina, as well as former Texas Governor Ann Richards, cyclist Lance Armstrong, film critic Joel Siegel, and supermodel Lauren Hutton. A work of emotional brilliance and political substance from one of the treasures of the American theater.
RSVP Details
Registration for this members-only opportunity opens on Wednesday, November 3 at 10:00 AM EDT. If you know someone who may be interested, please invite them to become a member and join the club. Space is limited, but we’ll send a friendly reminder to register once registration is live.
Show Credits
Anna Deveare Smith
she/her PlaywrightAnna Deavere Smith is an actress and playwright who is said to have created a new form of theatre. In popular culture as an actress—Nurse Jackie, Blackish, Madame Secretary, The West Wing, The American President, Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, others. Books: Letters to a Young Artist and Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines. Anna has created more than person shows based on hundreds of interviews. The best known of those are Fires in The Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, and Let Me Down Easy. Fires and Twilight look at US race relations. The latter deals with health care. They were all performed in US regional theaters, and Twilight was on Broadway. Anna’s current project Notes From the Field: Doing Time In Education, looks at what is now called the “school to prison pipeline”—disciplinary practices in schools in poor communities that increase the likelihood that those youths will spend part of their lives incarcerated. Three of her plays have been broadcast on PBS.
The National Endowment named her the 2015 Jefferson Lecturer for the Humanities. The lecture is the highest honor the government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Prizes include the National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama, a MacArthur fellowship, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, two Tony nominations, and two Obies. Anna was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for her play Fires in the Mirror. She has received several honorary degrees. She is founder and director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University.
