This week’s podcast is a June, 2011 interview with Anna Deavere Smith, while she was in the Bay Area discussing her then latest project, Let Me Down Easy, which was running at Berkeley Rep into early September of that year.

Anna Deavere Smith has written and performed in several one-woman plays similar in style to Let Me Down Easy, including Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which consist of short monologues in the voices and characters of individuals she interviewed. Prior to the interview, she'd appeared as an actress in several movies, and as a regular on both The West Wing and Nurse Jackie.

She returned to Berkeley Rep three years later with another show, Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, which was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on HBO and HBO Max. Since 2011 she has been a regular on the TV shows Blackish and For The People, and is listed in the cast of an upcoming Netflix series, Inventing Anna. She was also seen in the film Can You Ever Forgive Me.