Prepare for an extraordinary experience when TV and stage actress Anna Deavere Smith presents characters that bring to life issues touched on in the Allentown Art Museum's special exhibition This Light of Ours. Hailed by Newsweek as “the most exciting individual in American theater,” Ms. Smith uses solo performance to explore the arts and humanities, identity, and community in America. She began interviewing people—now more than two thousand—across the country some twenty years ago. Without props, sets, or costumes, she translates those encounters into profound performances, each drawing verbatim from the original recorded interview. She has an uncanny ability to inhabit the characters--or rather the people--she’s representing onstage, regardless of their race, gender, or age.
After the performance/presentation, which is being held at Muhlenberg College, there will be a period of interaction with the audience. $15 members, $20 nonmembers
In addition to appearing on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, Anna Deavere Smith’s television credits include The West Wing, Black-ish, and Madame Secretary. She has appeared in films, including Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, and The American President. In 1997 she founded Anna Deavere Smith Works at Harvard. Now part of the Aspen Institute, where Smith is on the Board of Trustees, ADS Works “cultivates artistic excellence that embraces the social issues of the day.” A University Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and an affiliate with the NYU School of Law, Smith delivered the 2015 NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.