Anna Deavere Smith's Notes From the Field to Open at American Repertory Theater

The American Repertory Theater at Harvard University will present the New England premiere of Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education, created, written, and performed by Anna Deavere Smith (The West Wing). Performances will run from August 20-September 17 at the Loeb Drama Center.

Directed by Leonard Foglia with music composed and performed by Marcus Shelby, Notes From the Field traces the connections between America’s education system and its mass incarceration crisis. In the first act, Smith portrays the students, parents, teachers, and administrators caught in America’s school-to-prison pipeline. The second act includes facilitated discussions, asking audiences to evaluate their own position in a network of difficult histories and devastating social policies.

Smith received the National Humanities Medal, presented to her by President Obama in 2013, and was the 2015 Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was also a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow for Theatre Arts for the development of Notes From the Field and a MacArthur Fellow. She received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize as well as two Tony nominations for writing and performing her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Her play Fires in the Mirror, seen at A.R.T. in 1992, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

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