The playwright, actress, storyteller, and activist Anna Deavere Smith will perform a selection of monologues at the Villa Aurelia on May 17 while a Writer in Residence at the Academy. Smith is a one-of-a-kind talent whose captivating one-woman performances have redefined the genre known as documentary theater. Her monologues draw power from her uncanny ability to channel the people she interviews. She nails their accents, speech patterns, physical postures, and gestures, giving voice to those who are swept up in some of the most perplexing issues of our time. Racism, violence, social injustice, and institutional ineptitude are recurring themes. “I’m looking for the people who would scream it from a mountaintop, and I just happen to be walking by,” she said in a recent interview.

Her first accolades came in the early 1990s, with Fires in the Mirror, which documented the viewpoints of dozens of people after the Crown Heights riots, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a response to the Rodney King riots. Nearly twenty-five years later, she has found herself on the streets in her hometown of Baltimore in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death, where she has conducted countless interviews, focusing in particular on the impact of racism targeted at the young. She’s tackling the “school to prison pipeline” in which children, mostly of color, get in trouble at school for minor offenses and are then funneled into the criminal justice system. Smith continues to collect interviews across the United States for Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, her work in progress on this topic.