Playwright Anna Deavere Smith turns to her family’s history for inspiration

June 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Anna Deavere Smith has spent fifty years building a theater out of other people’s exact words. She interviews people caught inside national fractures—a riot, an epidemic, a broken school system—and then stands alone onstage and performs their speech, down to every hesitation and rhythm shift. Her new play, Basil Biggs, breaks that method. For the first time, she is writing about her own family, and she cannot use a single word from her subject’s mouth.

The problem of a silent ancestor

The title character is Smith’s great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who became a central figure in Gettysburg after the Civil War. Smith learned about him in 2014 while appearing on Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the episode, Gates reads an obituary revealing that Biggs’s family fled when Confederate troops approached, and that his farm was converted into a Confederate field hospital. “That’s a play,” Gates says on camera. Smith agrees—but then did nothing about it for a decade. “I am an artist. I’m nomadic. I go from pillar to post,” she explains. Other gigs got in the way.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:17) **Introducing Anna Deavere Smith & Her New Play** - Tanya Mosley introduces Smith, her pioneering verbatim theater, and her new play *Basil Biggs* about her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man in Gettysburg.
2 (03:36) **The Challenge of Writing Without Words** - Smith explains her struggle: Biggs couldn't read or write, leaving no diary or letters, forcing her to abandon her documentary form.
3 (09:48) **A Homecoming: Choosing a Cast Over a One-Woman Show** - Smith explains her decision to write a traditional play rather than perform Biggs herself, marking a major shift from her usual solo work.
4 (11:59) **The Origin of Verbatim Theater** - Smith traces her method back to a Shakespeare teacher who explained how rhythmic disruptions (trochees) reveal emotional disarray in characters like King Lear.
5 (16:43) **Early Interviews & The Oral Tradition** - Smith recalls her first subject, Julia from J.C. Penney, and the epiphany that "the character should be the star, not the actor."
6 (23:04) **How She Chooses Subjects & The Story of *Let Me Down Easy*** - Smith explains she starts with an abstract problem (e.g., healthcare) and finds the story through the interview process.
7 (26:47) **Embodying Brent Williams, a Rodeo Bull Rider** - Smith plays a clip of Brent Williams complaining about his health insurance deductible, then discusses his physicality on stage.

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Show Notes

For more than 50 years, Anna Deavere Smith has pioneered a type of theater built from real people's words, interviewing hundreds of Americans and then performing their words verbatim. Now she's telling a story from her own family with ‘Basil Biggs.’ It’s about her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man, who reburied the Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground for Lincoln's most famous speech. Smith spoke with Tonya Mosley about how ‘Finding Your Roots’ led her to this story and why she sees herself as an Americanist.

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