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

drop every hour with the latest on U.S. politics, international news, the economy, health,

science, technology, and more, five minutes is all it takes to get fully caught up with NPR News Now. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, actor and playwright Anna DeVier Smith, has played a national security advisor on the West Wing, a matriarch on blackish, and a magazine editor on inventing Anna. But for more than 50 years, the work she keeps returning to

is America itself Smith pioneer at what we now call documentary or verbatim theater. She interviews people, sometimes hundreds of them caught inside a national fracture, like a riot, or epidemic, and then she stands alone in a stage and performs their exact words. In her 1992 play Fires in the Mirror, she became Crown Heights Brooklyn, in the aftermath of a deadly racial conflict. In Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992,

she became the city in the days after the Rotteny King verdict. In her 2016 play notes from the field, she examined the school to prison pipeline. Here she is, as Latisha de Santiago, a parent from Stockton, California, on the length she takes to keep her kids out of trouble.

“And I think I was a very strict mother, anything involving my kids. I was very involved by”

used to even go at night time and some mail them. Yes, so yes, yes, to see if they were not drinking or smoking. Oh, yes, there's so many things. I'll keep my kids out of trouble and thanks to the Laura, I think I did a good job. Anna Devere Smith's new play turns that lens on her own family. Basil Biggs premieres this month in Philadelphia, written for the nation's 250th anniversary. The title character is her great-great-grandfather, a free black man who became a prominent

Gettysburg figure, and the conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping to lead enslaved people to

freedom. Smith first learned about him a decade ago while appearing on PBS's "Finding Your Roots"

with Henry Louis Gates Jr. In this clip, Gates explains the remarkable role Biggs played in the Wars aftermath. Now, this habituary Anna is for celia Biggs pen, Basil's daughter, who died in 1936, and it gives us a sense of what your ancestors did in the faithful days right before the battle. Mrs. Pen, last of kin, who fled 63 battle, dies. The only colored persons in this section, the Biggs family, was warned to leave this section with the approach of the Confederate

“troops. Wow! Your ancestors fled unbelievable the Confederate invasion. Now, remember it's”

three days of combat, right? Right. And Basil's farm was converted into a field hospital by the

Confederates. My God, that's a story right there. That's an amazing, that's a play.

Anna DeVier Smith, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. That moment that we just heard, I think the audience, if they watch it, I think we all came to the same conclusion at the same time, including you, that it is a play, and now it is exactly a play. Take us to that moment. Sure, well, so that was me with my friend, Skip, aka Henry Louis Gates Jr. And it was a very powerful moment I have to say. But maybe what's equally as interesting is that I did nothing about it.

That was in 2014 when it aired on PBS. My family raced off to Gatesburg, and that would be my generation of cousins and sisters rushed off. And for some reason, I couldn't go. I mean, you know,

“I am an artist. I'm nomadic. I go from pillar to post, and the only thing that was in the way,”

other gigs, that's what was in the way. And then Kathy Sachs, who was an extraordinary philanthropist and arts collector, has been putting together a remarkable festival of arts here in Philadelphia, which is where I am right now, called What Now. And she asked me to write something for it, and because it was for the 250th anniversary and because it was in Pennsylvania, I thought, oh, this is the time for me to write about Basel Biggs. What's a detail about Basel's life that

completely surprised you? I mean, the entire story is pretty remarkable, but what was something that

was that he could not read and write and neither could my great-great-grandmother Mary Jackson Biggs,

“which meant that I had nothing to go on in his words, no diaries, no letters. Now, that wouldn't”

seem unusual for black people at that time, but the way I've worked for 50 years is to study every single, not just word, but utterance that a person makes in order to put together an American story. So I had no document, nothing documentary to go on. I had photographs, that was it. And of course, the civil war has been written about extensively as has the Battle of Gettysburg. So I could sort of put together the facts of the era, but I don't have a word out of the mouth of my great-great-grandfather

or his children. So this called for me to leave my documentary form, it allows me to still be the Americanist that I believe I am, but I had to do a different kind of writing, a different kind of inquiry. How did you bring them to life? I was really terrified, honestly, you know, staring at the blank page. I had a fabulous time in Gettysburg, you know, made great friends there, felt absolutely in home in Gettysburg, spent a lot of time in the archives, but I still didn't know how to put the words

“on paper. And what the best thing that happened was that I had been able to visit the farm,”

his first farm in Gettysburg. The farm is still there, the house is still there, the barn is still there,

the creek is still there. And we believe that that's where he did a lot of his underground railroad activity. This is the house that was taken over by the Confederates and turned into the Confederate hospital. There is still blood on the floor, walking around the barn, walking around the farm, really gave me the rooting that I needed to start writing. I don't know what I would have done it if I hadn't had a chance to walk around that farm. And so it's also interesting that especially

for a black man of that era, all three of the houses that he lived in Gettysburg are still standing.

He is the reason Lincoln had ground to stand on in that fateful November. He reburied the union

dead, right? So that the cemetery could be dedicated so that the Gettysburg address could be delivered. That's right. And the underground railroad, also obviously, is a story that one has to put together shreds for. It's underground, right? But the reason that he's commemorated now, the reason he's honored now in Gettysburg. What happened was that when we're got out, that the Confederates were coming to Gettysburg. You know, now we think about these things. And of course you go to the battlefield,

but you know, it was a farm town, right? And when word was out, that the Confederates were coming, black people had every reason to believe that they were going to be snatched and taken back to the south, whether they were free or not. This had happened a massive invasion and raid had happened nearby in Chambersburg. So my great-great-grandfather took his family, my great-great-grandmother and the children away. When they came back, really, just a few days later, the farm had been taken over by the

“Confederates. They had claimed the houses their hospital. And I believe that my that basilpigs”

had lost everything. I mean, he couldn't read him right, but he was a very entrepreneurial, he had a robust farm. He had a good business as a veterinarian. And I think that he took the grizzly job of disintering the Union dead and rebearing them and cleaning up the 7,000 dead bodies with a group of other black men that he brought together. I believe that that he did that because he was broke. Now, it could be that, you know, we had a huge civic responsibility. I'm not sure.

But they started that in October and they had it in good enough shape that by November when Lincoln came to consecrate what becomes the National Soldier Cemetery. It was it was possible to do. The irony is that at least then black Union soldiers were not buried in that cemetery. And so basilpigs was a part of an organization called the Sons of Goodwill who created a separate cemetery at that time for the black Union dead. Did you ever consider playing

bigs yourself like a one-woman show because this is a traditional play with with a cast of actors?

huge, you know, trying to find who would play these characters. And one actor walked in and looked

“exactly like my cousin Basil Bigs and like my brother. And there's a scene in the play that is just”

a real sort of contentious moment between Basil and this young man called Calvin. And I have to tell you, I just burst out crying in the auditions of sobbing because it just reminded me of discord between my brother and my father. And I made a very intentional decision in 1980 when many of us who were not white heterosexual presenting males were encouraged, not just invited, but encouraged to write about ourselves. And I made the opposite move. And I said, I'm not going to write about

myself, not going to write about the family. I'm going to chase America in terms of that which is not

me. And I did that for 50 years. And so the have this kind of homecoming is very powerful in so many

“ways. And I think to see it outside of myself, rather than trying to embody it, it's part of the power.”

This is fresh air. And today I am talking with actor and playwright Anna DeVier Smith. Her new play, Basil Bigs traces the life of her great, great grandfather and the civil war era Gettysburg. It premieres this month at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, written for the nation's 250th anniversary. Smith was born in Baltimore in 1950 and came up through the theatre as a classically trained actor. Somewhere along the way, she set down a different path. Instead of playing

invented characters, she started turning a tape recorder on real Americans and performing their exact words, becoming a pioneer of what we now call documentary or verbatim theatre. And I want to talk a little bit about verbatim theatre because you came up, as I said, as an actor. And then you did this unusual thing instead of looking for roles, you started collecting people. What spark

“that shift? You know, I think everything starts with a question. And I feel, for example, that”

education should be about us discovering our questions rather than seeking answers. And I had that extraordinary opportunity in a Shakespeare class when I first started studying acting. I didn't really begin that pursuit until I was 22 years old. And our Shakespeare teacher, on the first day, and I was very worried about Shakespeare class. And it's about speaking Shakespeare's not Shakespeare scholarship, made this particular suggestion that we expect the rhythm of Shakespeare to be like this.

What we call Iambic Pintameter. And she suggested in her argument that when we are trying to speak Shakespeare, we just speak the words as they are written, right? We don't add extra emotion or anything. In making that argument, she said, "But if there is an upside down rhythm in the second beat, this tells you that something is arrived with the character." So, that little other beats called a trokey. So, if the rhythm goes "da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da." That means there's

something unsettled. And she gave the example of the end of the play in Lear when Lear has lost

everything. And he says, "Never, never, never, never, never. Everything's upside down." So, when I was

in the conservatory, I was trying to figure out how did that happen? How could emotions be captured in rhythms? And I decided that I would see if I could listen in real life to how people's rhythms changed. And if those changes would be indicative not only of disarray in a story that individual was telling me, but also in the world around them. And so, this is one of those random things. I was at a cocktail party and standing next to like a wallflower, another woman was standing

next to me. And she asked me what I did, what was my work? And I never to this day, Sam, and actor.

Like, even on a plane, somebody says, "What do you do?" I never say, "I'm an actor because then you

have that very embarrassing question. Well, what have I seen you with?" So, I said, "Well, I'm trying to learn something about vaginal cocktail party. I'm trying to learn something about language and identity." And I said, "And I'm trying to figure out how to get people to break their linguistic

three questions that will guarantee this can happen in the course of an hour." And the questions were, "Have you ever come close to death? Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do?"

And, "Do you know the circumstances of your birth?" And so, the first show that I made was with

other actors. I only played one part. And I literally walked up to people on the streets of New York or wherever they were. And I said, "I know an actor who looks like you. If you'll give me an hour of your time, I will invite you to see yourself perform." This was in 1980. And so, I talked to the lifeguard at the gym. I talked to the lady up the street who had a second hand, closed store. I talked to somebody who was in a fancy beauty parlor. And I made a show in which

I would talk to somebody for an hour about whatever they want to talk about hair, swimming

lanes, and somewhere in that I would ask those questions. And lo and behold, they're at language

stuck on these different patterns. And so, I trained myself how to listen by doing that. And then when you think about it, since I've gone to do plays about things that are upside down, are in disarray, are not Iambic pentameters, but are trokies. Then it is the case that people speak in disrupted sentences. And they struggle to make sense, which means that they actually make these gorgeous, as far as I'm concerned, sort of architectures of language. And I'm very

“interested in those things. I will call them those moments. And that's what I perform.”

I'm sure you've heard a lot of people say, "Oh, that takes a lot of bravery for you to just

walk up to people on the street and just ask them questions." What were those early response as to you? Because you weren't talking to people on behalf of, say, a news organization or something tangible specific that people know that this would go toward? Well, I think, you know, it was kind of a curious thing, right? For some girl to ask you that, or I was doing a lot of temp work at the time. And the person I performed was Julia, who was at JC Penny. We worked in

a basement. My desk was right next to hers. And I would hear Julia talking on the phone. And I thought, "I've got to get in here with Julia." So I know in advance, you know, of somebody who

“I thought was very, very interesting. And I think because nobody had ever asked them before.”

And by the way, this isn't like now where people are going around taking selfies and pictures of each other. This is when my tape recorder was, you know, it was like this Panasonic thing that was probably almost a foot long. Yeah. Right. So people weren't walking around with iPhones that they could record on. So I think it was like this odd thing, rather charming girl, asking them to do. And they said, "Yes." My own curiosity. What was so interesting about Julia

on the phone at JC Penny? She was just like, you know, she was one of those people who was she was so, oh, she had a story about somebody who just had a meltdown on a bus going through the tunnel, the Lincoln tunnel in New York. And she, as often, was so beautiful about black people in particular, is she acted out like all the people, right? So that was so great, you know. And you know, I'll have to tell you another sort of epiphany I had about Julia. So I'd said,

I only played one part in that play. It was Julia. And she came, it was so exciting to see the people come to see themselves performed in this loft in New York and Julia waited for me with her friends. And as we're walking down Leonard Street in her friend, Julia, girl, you would have star girl,

“you would have star. And I thought, yeah, the character should be the star, not the actor, right?”

And so, I mean, she just was one of those black women with a great sense of humor and a great ability to tell a story. I'll see this story. Okay, I was wondering, you know, a lot of your performances remind me of an oral tradition. I know some black households have like the way people slide in and out of imitating others to kind of drive a point home. Did you see that growing up? What was the story telling? Oh, yeah. I mean, Miss Johnson, next door who weighed 400 pounds couldn't move very

far and would, you know, give me 25 cents a go down by her, some fat back from the grocery store, Mr. Zalman's grocery store. And then, you know, I would sit on her portion here a story and she had.

So, as was my maternal grandmother. So, I, I do anything for a story when I was little and you're right.

“There's that oral tradition. My own Esther is the first person I ever interviewed,”

sitting in her kitchen all my life. I listened to her, but I, the first actual interview I did knowing that I wanted to create this kind of theater, I tested it out on An Esther. Our guest today is actor and playwright Anna DeVier Smith. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is fresh air. This is our glass. On this American life, when they mean like, it's a good mystery. Sometimes it's about really big things, but most times,

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“On consider this NPR's afternoon news podcast, we cover everything for politics to the”

economy to the world, but every story starts with a question. And NPR, we stand for your right to be curious to make sense of the biggest story of the day and what it means for you. Follow consider this wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is the actor playwright and professor Anna DeVier Smith. Over the last four decades, she invented and defined what's known as

documentary or verbatim theater. She's interviewed hundreds of people, then performed them on stage. Fires in the mirror about the Crown Heights conflict made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Twilight Los Angeles 1992 about the city after the rotten King verdict earned her two Tony nominations. She went on to write "Let Me Down Easy" about the body and the American health care system and notes from the field about the school to prison pipeline. Her new play is called Basil Biggs,

“and it's the story of her own great great-grandfather, a free black man who played an important role”

in the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. This thing that you do, this verbatim theater, I have heard you describe it as your borrowing people's stories with their permission, and there's something very specific about the people you choose, how do you decide who to interview? Well, who to interview is just who, you know, say my play "Let Me Down Easy" was about health care, but it was also about the vulnerability of the human body to the state, to disease, and so I did extensive interviewing.

I went to, for example, South Africa, during the AIDS crisis when in Becky was an AIDS denialist. I went to Rwanda ten years after the genocide, sort of broken societies and talked to people, and I have an abstract idea of the problem that I'm trying to investigate, and I don't have a story, and then in the process of doing the interviews, and more importantly, in the process of being in the rehearsal room, I find a throughline of a story. Where did the inspiration come for

"Let Me Down Easy?" Dr. Ralph Harrow, which was ahead of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and he invited me in the late '90s to come to Yale Medical School and to interview doctors and patients and to perform at something called medical grand rounds as a way of showing the doctors

that they don't listen. And I kept saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no. At first, I thought it was

because I was just too intimidated to be around all those doctors, and he didn't give up, and when I finally went and started doing the interviews of patients, I realized the reason I was really worried was because I knew it would have something to do with death. And I did this performance at medical grand rounds, and I performed doctors, and some people who had been very, very sick. And after that performance, maybe a year later, he asked me to come back and do it

in another situation, and I did, and those same patients that were waiting eagerly backstage to say, "Hello." And I thought, "Now, why would you want to come to see a show again?" That's dealing with a moment in your life where you almost died. And it dawned on me because dying or not, something about the performance made it all real in a good way and solid in a good way. Because this is before the big health care conversation. But once the health care

real, then I realize I have a real sort of political place to put this excursion really around death

“into a frame. And that's what made me continue to work on it. And also, because, you know,”

people say, "Oh, how did you get this person to talk to you?" Or, "How did you get this person to trust you?" I say, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no." I'm looking for the people who are screaming from a mountain top, and I just happen to be walking by. And when you go into a palliative care unit, you sit with somebody who's dying. If they have the strength, it's a scream from the mountain top. They want to be heard. They want to communicate. And that's very dramatic and very stageworthy.

In let me down easy, there's a person that you embody, Brent Williams. He's a rodeo bull rider from Idaho.

You talk about him quite a bit over the last 20 years. He's with someone who really taught you what seems like a lot of lessons. But I want to play a little clip because he talked to you about the ways bull riding his wrecked his body that he has this one story that a bull shoved his face through metal shoots, for example. And in this clip of your performances, Williams, you're talking about his health care deductible. Yeah, I got insurance, blue cross of Idaho, family policy tour,

60 bucks a month cover all of us. Man, we got a $7500 deductible, which is stupid. I mean, you, we don't ever meet that. I mean, all this pay in money. Then we got to pay $7500 before they meet it. They're just trying to rape us. Like all of people had got the money. They raped the poor. So pretty soon, or the rape, the middle class did a middle class becomes poor. Then it got to

“start raping to rich. And they're going to break the whole country, I think. But basically,”

I'm an optimist. That was my guest Anna DeVierse Smith as Brent Williams and let me down easy. And when you watch this, there's a lot of physicality to that performance. You're wearing a cowboy hat. Your legs are wide. You're strutting across the stage. And these are parts of the story as well, that body language. What is it telling us? What is it telling you that words don't convey?

First of all, if my performance is attentive to detail, then you see the choreography.

You don't know why you're drawn to that person. But if we were to sit down and break it down for you and show you the choreography, you'd know why. I mean, with Brent, he was kind of outrageous. You know, I actually invited Brent to New York a couple of times. And he's a very different person then the sort of artist that I hang out with. Very, very conservative. But you know, he's a perfect example of someone who's game, you know, who comes with goodwill. He knows. And I have, he was in my

apartment dancing cheek to cheek with the astute legal scholar Patricia Williams. What? Wow. And so it's about goodwill. You know, we talk about how do we get over these differences. It's like he doesn't agree with anybody at, in this case, sitting around the dinner and then dancing afterwards and people are drinking up, you know, in a great, nobody agrees with Brent. But he felt at home in my house, right? You like talking to people that you don't agree with.

Well, not necessarily all the time for the purpose of, of putting them in a play. Yes.

“So, you know, we have to admit that that's also different in a way from real life, right?”

I can do things in my art that I may not be able to do in my life. So with Brent, I went to the national rodeo finals with him and standing around with all of his friends, you know, swinging shivers and telling stories about women that weren't so great, right? Would I be doing that? Just for fun? Probably not. Today I'm talking with actor and playwright Anna DeVierse Smith about her new play, Basil Biggs.

It's about her own great, great grandfather, a free black man who reburied thousands of union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground where Lincoln delivered his famous address. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air. Every episode of its been a minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture Podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it.

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This is fresh air and today I am talking with actor and playwright Anna DeVier Smith. Her new play, Basil Biggs, traces the life of her great, great-grandfather and the Civil War Era Getty's Burg. It premieres this month at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, written for the nation's 250th anniversary. Smith's earlier plays include fires in the mirror, Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992, and her 2016 play "Notes from the Field."

I want to talk briefly about the choices you made in Notes from the field. You showcased a wide range of people, civil rights leaders, and high school students, and prisoners like Denise Dodson. She was an inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women and she was serving time for murder and I'm going to play a clip. Here she is talking about her children and the circumstances of her crime. You playing her. Let's listen.

I had six children. Now I have five. One of them died since I've been here. The oldest being 34, the youngest being 21. I have my youngest child when I was in a Baltimore detention center. I've been here 23 years. Well, my boyfriend, my former boyfriend, because we wasn't together at the time, shot and killed a guy who tried to rape me. Well, they didn't consider the accomplice. I got the same charge as he did. First, a great murder.

“I think it's fair. You've talked about some of his life.”

What was in your control or not, some of my life has been taken. So I do think it's fair. But I think that if I had had a better education, I would have been more upright, so to speak.

You know, because we're about that education, I always felt less than. And I think if I had

had that education, I would have known that I am somebody. I am a good person. That was my guest Anna Divier Smith as inmate Denise Dodson. I can almost hear your questions in her answers. And of course, like the questions you asked to elicit those answers. But it's her demeanor. She was one of several black women and girls at the heart of this

“notes from the field. What drew you to put people like her at the center of the story?”

Well, the story really was about looking at the pressures or what we would call, what are the things that pull us away from giving people an education? And why, when they are unable to fit into maybe the sorting mechanism of education, do they end up incarcerated? And I heard a chilling statistic that there's something like, it's in the 70% of black and brown kids that can't really read at the level they need to read just across the board in the United States.

Yeah. And so we have to ask deeply, deeply. What's in the way of that? And notes from the field was looking at education and the things that pull people away from school and the things that pull people away from people. And with Denise, you know, of course, sitting in a prison. I mean, she's aware of being under surveillance all the time. You know, she's probably about

saying. And there was extraordinary humility in Denise and emotional power and her job in prison

“was to train service dogs. And she talked about how dogs are more decent than people.”

And even that the amount of attention that she gives those dogs to train them, what if we gave the same type of attention to children. And the last thing I'll say about this is even if you go back to Thomas Jefferson. And you look at his plan in the notes from the state of Virginia, on the state of Virginia, his plan for education was to find the excellent ones and throw out the rubbish. The word rubbish is in that document. So, and that's just talking about white men.

And so our system has always been one of sorting. Let's sort out the people that we don't want to be

bothered with. You ended up studying at the American Conservatory Theater. This theater community that you then became a part of, you know, the way we think about theater today is always talking it about it in terms of keeping it alive. And this sounds like this was a vibrant place for you. First of all, my first job was for a black theater company that had been started by Ed Ballons, great black playwright. And it was called the grassroots theater company. And the I went in there

to see if there was something I could do. And they said, well, you could be the stage manager. I said, well, I don't know how to do that. Oh, you'll be fine. You look like you could be good. I was there so called stage manager. And I had a crisis when I decided to go to school at the American Conservatory Theater, which would be like the white people's theater, you know, in the middle of town that was very, you know, resource and not to work anymore at the grassroots theater company.

But the American Conservatory Theater had a company of 52 actors. And that's where I was trained.

So that was entirely different type of time than now. And you know, we always say the theater is

“dying. But I think it's that it has another economic model now. Those were the days when the idea”

was to have a theater in your town that was the sort of gem, the cultural gem of a town, like a symphony. And that changed when those theaters started to see themselves as breeding places for Broadway. And so I would say it's not that the theater is dead. It's that it had a different economic model. And we never know when that may change again. I mean, you're deep in the Basil Big Story right now. But is there, is there an American story?

You have your sights on for the future that's been swirling in your head that you're dying to explore? No, because I think that that Basil Big's story about approaching the Civil War about being a part of restoring his town after this massive, massive catastrophe. And following through to touch the American promise and going through the 15th Amendment,

“which the play takes us through that, I think there are many things about that that are still”

unfinished business in our country right now. And so I'm pleased to be able to to see what lessons I can learn, the actors can learn, and the audience can learn by looking at that moment in history and looking at this particular family and how they came through it. Anna DeVirre Smith, thank you so much for this conversation and your time. This has been a real pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you so much to you and your producers.

Actor and playwright Anna DeVirre Smith. Her new play, Basil Big's debuts at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia this weekend. Coming up, TV critic David B. and Cooley reviews Larry David's new HBO series. This is Fresh Air. Each story you hear on planet money starts with a question. What happens if we refund tariffs? Why are grocery so expensive? And MPR, we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's planet

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HBO presents a new seven-part sketch comedy series that's an irreverent look at American history just in time for the country's 250th anniversary. It's called life, Larry and the pursuit of unhappiness and it stars Larry David and comes from higher ground, Barack and Michelle Obama's production company. Our TV critic David B. and Kooley

“has this review. One of the first things the Obama's did for TV after forming their higher ground”

production company was built a series around a singular American voice. That voice was studs turkle, the Chicago writer whose 1974 working-class oral history working was a major influence on the young Barack Obama. In 2023 Obama saluted and continued turkles vision by hosting and narrating working what we do all day. A very impressive, very serious four-part Netflix documentary series. Now, higher ground is building another series around a singular American voice. The results are equally

impressive, but much less serious. Because this time, the voice belongs to Larry David, America's unofficial national curmudgeon. He's turned being disgruntled into a massive fortune, and into a lengthy brilliant comedy career that includes sign-filled, curb your enthusiasm, and now, life, Larry, and the pursuit of unhappiness. This new series is created and written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer. They're also executive producers as are the Obama's.

Schaffer directs and is well tuned to Larry David's rhythms and sensibilities. Over the decades, Schaffer wrote dozens of episodes of sign-filled and wrote and directed even more installments of curb. Their new collaboration is much more heavily scripted than ad-libbed and is expensively mounted. Costumes, sets, even action sequences all look first-rate. But even when Larry David is part of a silent tabloe recreating the continental Congress, wearing a powdered wig while Barack Obama

opens the show as the host, Larry can't stay silent for long. But what truly makes America unique

is the fact that we've always been a work in progress. We're not perfect. We can be

erasable. Petty, selfish, cheap, and let's face it. Some of us will always find something to complain about. But as Americans, we've always found a way to overcome these nasirs, these deeply unpleasant people who stood in the way of progress. These miserable, intolerable. Did I mention Petty? Ratchet? Hey, none of that's in the script! Life, Larry in the pursuit of unhappiness, is subtitled an almost history of America,

and provides just that. Each sketch introduced by narrator Samuel L. Jackson starts with historical fact, then veers wildly and enjoyable off the rails. In every sketch, the guest stars get the vibe David is after and add to it effortlessly. The opening sketch imagines that founding father Robert Livingston, played by Larry David, suggested some rather unusual rules for the declaration of independence before Thomas Jefferson took over the job of writing it.

Henry Winkler plays John Hancock and Chris Parnell plays Benjamin Franklin, who's reading some of Livingston's outrageous ideas to the assembled Congress.

“Here's another gem, no sharing desserts. If you want to dessert, order it, none of this”

pass it around. We'll not animals miss the Franklin all eating out of a trough. We can all have our own forks. They will all take bites, put the forks in our mouths, put it back in the pie, after it's been in our mouths. Mr Franklin, it's unsanitary. Sometimes I don't want to hold slice of pie, I just want to taste the pie. Get your own damn piece of pie Franklin! If you the next sketch jumps forward a full century from 1776 to 1876 and has Larry David,

The guests, though, are quick to offer suggestions of their own. My assistant Watson,

is in another building, out of sight and sound, but with this device, I will be able to communicate with him as if he was standing right next to me. I will pick up the phone on my side and it will ring on his. What kind of ring? Normal ring, it's just a ring, it's a ring, a typical ring. Maybe there could be a menu of rings that people could choose from. Oh yes, I would like mine to sound like a doorbell. I'd like mine to sound like a clown horn.

Or perhaps a bicycle ring, you know, ring. Oh, all wonderful ideas, but hardly the point. The point is I'll be able to communicate with someone who is miles away. What if I'm at a piano recital say and I don't want it to ring, so it just vibrates like a like a jews harp in your pocket.

“That's just a fascinating idea. What if you could send show? What if you invest your own?”

Go off and invent your own. That's not this. You want something that vibrates? Go! Go invested. This is all nonsense. Yes, it is all nonsense. Even with some punchlines that are

sharp and pointed, it's also whimsical, it's wonderful. Other sketches in the first show include

trench warfare during World War I and Rosa Parks on a Birmingham bus ride predating her famous bus boycott. HBO wants a lot of the sketch details kept secret and I'm fine with that. But every sequence brings its own unexpected joys. Hey, isn't that Richard Kind and Michael Chickalis and Sean Hayes, Catherine Han, Bill Hayter and John Ham and Jerry Seinfeld from Seinfeld and Jeff Garland, Susie Esman and JB Smooth from Curb all joining in? Yes, it is.

“And there are others aboard, too, as unpublished special surprises.”

Of coming sketches are based on everything from the Lewis and Clark expedition, to the army McCarthy hearings and the moon landing, and are equally hilarious. I've seen enough to say that Larry David isn't just having great fun with history. He's adding to his own, with yet another high-concept comedy series Home Run. David being truly reviewed life, Larry, and the pursuit of unhappiness. The series premieres on HBO tomorrow.

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