Anna Deveare Smith's "Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education: The Baltimore Chapter" at Center Stage - Entrepreneur Generations

This weekend, Baltimore was lucky enough to be host to Baltimore native Anna Deavere Smith's new play Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education: The Baltimore Chapter, and I attended on Saturday night.

Ms. Smith, a graduate of Western High School, is most well-known as an actress from Nurse Jackie and The West Wing, but she is also a renowned playwright; she has written 18 plays throughout her career, including Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992 and Fires in the Mirror. Smith's main playwriting process is to interview lots of people involved in the subject she is interested in writing about, and then to portray the people in a staged documentary play in basically a one-woman show (other than an accompanying upright bassist). With no set and minimal costume changes, Smith is able to embody many diverse people along the School-to-Prison pipeline, portraying the real people she interviewed.

The stage.

What I'm not totally clear about after watching the play, and doing a little bit of reading about it, is how the "Baltimore Chapter" of the Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education differs from the "California Chapter" and how it will differ from the upcoming South Carolina readings. Is this just one work, constantly evolving, to be published sometime in the future? Or are they separate works, with separate monologues? There's definitely an excitement to seeing a play before it's published, and we as audience members have to understand it's a work in progress, with constant revision as the play is being performed and written.

Smith is trying to do a lot here, and bringing in the Freddie Gray situation felt a little shoehorned sometimes. Is Freddie Gray a school-to-prison pipeline cautionary tale? He probably is, but the connection isn't made to Gray's schooling; we hear from the videographer who filmed Gray's arrest, Kevin Moore; a West Baltimore teenager named India Sledge; Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake; and Allen Bullock, the 18-year old protestor who was arrested for throwing a traffic cone through a police car windshield and given a $500,000 bail, but just a little bit about the Baltimore schools. The connection is there, but there are many themes running through this play. Later, I read an interview with Smith where she explains her choice: "The death of Freddie Gray is emblematic of how punitive our society has become. And, you know, I think the harsh punishment that we're seeing in schools has something to do with that." And there are monologues that deal with punishment of youth, as well as punishment in schools, such as a powerful monologue from a Hopkins professor about Baltmiore middle schools that just "send home" problem students instead of suspending them, in order to keep suspension numbers low.

Anna Deveare Smith

I found the Freddie Gray parts of the play to be among the most powerful, as clips from the Freddie Gray arrest and the uprising were played as part of the backdrop between monologues. But Smith is concerned with a very wide scope here, so we hear from judges in California and Pennsylvania, from inmates in California and Jessup, to principals and politicians and even James Baldwin.

(Note: One of my former students, Morgan Stevenson, is currently producing a documentary-style play solely about the Baltimore Uprising, and is looking for funding here in order to produce it. She's a graduating senior from The New School in NYC and a 2012 Baltimore City College alum.)

Overall, I found Smith's Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education to be provocative and moving, with some nice doses of humor. Smith is an incredible voice artist and actor, and her scope is exactly the thing live theater should do: provoke thought and inspire conversation, and maybe even create change. Indeed, there was a long intermission ("Act 2," she called it), in which the entire audience was broken into discussion groups to reflect on issues in Baltimore relating to the play, and Smith provided all audience with a "tool kit" for change as the program.

If you go see this play, you'll have your own favorite monologues. Mine were as follows:

Notes from one of the mid-show discussion groups.

Michael Tubbs, a City Councilman in Stockton, CA, who told the story of visiting a kindergarten class and reading to them a book about MLK. He glossed over the page about King's assassination, hoping not to upset any kids, but he discovered that all the kids there had experienced violence and trauma in their lives already. It reminded him of the Tupac Shakur poem about the rose growing from the concrete.

Kevin Moore, the man who filmed Freddie Gray's arrest and was arrested after that. "the camera is the only weapon that we have that's not illegal... but they might say they think you're carrying a gun and still shoot you." "I hope to God that somebody goes to jail for killing my friend Freddie Gray."

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's monologue, placed right after Moore's heartbreaking one, was about investment in communities, specifically the Mondawmin Target. The audience reacted with jitters when Rawlings-Blake's name appeared onscreen, and it's clear by Smith's placement of her measured, but tonedeaf response, that Smith had very purposeful reasons for that placement.

Johns Hopkins Education professor Robert Balfanz's monologue, called "Huck Finn," was also pretty remarkable for me in its truth-telling. Now, instead of suspending kids, some schools just send them home, so they're not on the books. Balfanz describes a moment when he was watching a middle school student running his stick along a fence, like Huck Finn, only to discover he was one of these "off the books" not-suspended kids. All the Baltimore teachers nodded their heads in recognition at this one.

The monologue from Judge Daniel Anders was also particularly moving, showing the photograph of a young child who became a ward of the state, and how, at age 20, he had to sentence him to prison, but he was a failure of the system.

Leticia de Santiago, a principal at a Philadelphia high school, also was featured in a very compelling monologue about pulling troubled kids through to graduation and to college. It was so funny, yet so heart-warming, that it was one of the highlights.

West Baltimore native Denise Dodson, an inmate at Jessup, was the second-to-last monologue. Hers was also really moving, telling her story of being jailed at the age of 23, and now raising and training service dogs while in prison. She's part of the Goucher Prison Education program.

Smith ends her show with a monologue from James Baldwin, from "A Rap on Race", from an interview he had with Margaret Mead. Some of the closing lines of the play were from a poem that Baldwin related came from a troubled 16-year old: "Walk on water / Walk on a leaf / Hardest of all / Walk on Grief." It tied together many of the themes of the production, from the impact of trauma on our young people to the connection between schools and prisons, and how young people shouldn't be punished, but should be nurtured.

It was one of those "I love Baltimore" nights overall. I was in a discussion group with my school district's superintendent, Dr. Thornton, as well as a bunch of diverse, concerned citizens of Baltimore, eager to change and to help. Smith's play can get us talking, let's hope it can get us acting as well.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/1NBVfX7 Anna Deveare Smith's "Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education: The Baltimore Chapter" at Center Stage - Entrepreneur Generations

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