Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, By One Route, and By Another is a staged reading in which Smith explores kindness, hospitality, and hope. Featuring individual portraits of real-life figures, Margaret Mead, Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, Ntozake Shange, Trudy Howell, and Matthieu Ricard, this Lincoln Center commission is newly curated by the artist in response to current events. Through the work, she reflects on the question, “What’s the quality of what happens when we open our doors?” A Q&A session follows the reading. 

About the Artist:
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress and playwright.  She is credited with having developed a new form of theater through which she creates portraits of real people based on interviews, revealing aspects of American identity. In original pieces covering topics as diverse as the school-to-prison pipeline (Notes from the Field), race-related violence (Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror), and health care (Let Me Down Easy), Smith interviews hundreds of individuals and creates plays that portray diverse communities and world views. Smith is recognizable to television and film audiences from performances in Black-ish, The West Wing, Nurse Jackie, For the People, Philadelphia, The American President and Rachel Getting Married. Her many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, and the National Humanities Medal bestowed by President Obama. She is also an author and a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In the 1980s, she was a faculty member with Lincoln Center Institute, the education and research division of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at the time.