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House Arrest: A Search for American Character in and Around the White House, Past and Present
HOUSE ARREST is a fascinating and compelling look at nothing less than the civil rights movement, the issues of slavery and racism, and the relationship between the press and the presidency over the course of American history. It begins by focusing on Jefferson and his fine words versus the likelihood that he had a long-standing affair with one of his slaves. From there HOUSE ARREST changes gears and moves forward to Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and examines how his affairs and disabilities were considered untouchable by the press. Smith interviewed many of the major players in American politics in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrates the way politics has changed since Roosevelt's administration. The play then jumps back to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and compares that event and the Kennedy assassination. The range of voices and opinions that appear in the play make for vivid and interesting theatre. HOUSE ARREST is a triumph of Smith's writing skills. In the course of over two hours, Smith weaves together historical writing and her own interviews with some 420 people both inside and outside of presidential politics. It's a fascinating blend of history and commentary that is by turns illuminating, heartening and saddening.
72 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Anna Deavere Smith
23 books159 followersAnna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950) is an American actress, playwright, and professor. She is currently the artist in residence at the Center for American Progress. Smith is widely known for her roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally in The West Wing and as Hospital Administrator Gloria Akalitus in the Showtime series Nurse Jackie. She is a recipient of The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2013), one of the richest prizes in the American arts with a remuneration of $300,000.
In 2009 Smith published her first book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics. In 2006 she released another, Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.
As a dramatist Smith was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for Fires in the Mirror which won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show. She was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1994 for Twilight: one for Best Actress and another for Best Play. The play won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance and a Theatre World Award.
Smith was one of the 1996 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant." She also won a 2006 Fletcher Foundation Fellowship for her contribution to civil rights issues as well as a 2008 Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications, Inc. In 2009 she won a Fellow Award in Theater Arts from United States Artists.
She has received honorary degrees from Spelman College, Arcadia University, Bates College, Smith College, Skidmore College, Macalester College, Occidental College, Pratt Institute, Holy Cross College,[disambiguation needed] Haverford College, Wesleyan University, School of Visual Arts, Northwestern University, Colgate University, California State University Sacramento, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wheelock College, Williams College, and the Cooper Union.
The United Solo Theatre Festival board awarded her with uAward for outstanding solo performer during the inaugural edition in November 2010.
In 2013, she received the 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
In 2009 Smith published her first book, Talk to Me: Travels in Media and Politics. In 2006 she released another, Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind.
As a dramatist Smith was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for Fires in the Mirror which won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show. She was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1994 for Twilight: one for Best Actress and another for Best Play. The play won her a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance and a Theatre World Award.
Smith was one of the 1996 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant." She also won a 2006 Fletcher Foundation Fellowship for her contribution to civil rights issues as well as a 2008 Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications, Inc. In 2009 she won a Fellow Award in Theater Arts from United States Artists.
She has received honorary degrees from Spelman College, Arcadia University, Bates College, Smith College, Skidmore College, Macalester College, Occidental College, Pratt Institute, Holy Cross College,[disambiguation needed] Haverford College, Wesleyan University, School of Visual Arts, Northwestern University, Colgate University, California State University Sacramento, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wheelock College, Williams College, and the Cooper Union.
The United Solo Theatre Festival board awarded her with uAward for outstanding solo performer during the inaugural edition in November 2010.
In 2013, she received the 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 14, 2020
“It doesn’t matter. He owned her. Get the story straight.”
actual rating 3.5/5
basically thomas jefferson was the worst but we already knew that. america’s political system is awful and everyone in it knows it’s awful but won’t do anything about it. so far this has been my least favorite of anna deavere smith’s shows because i didn’t feel like it has a main central point or topic that was heavily discussed like her other shows. i still love her writing and unique storytelling but i just wanted more out of this show.
actual rating 3.5/5
basically thomas jefferson was the worst but we already knew that. america’s political system is awful and everyone in it knows it’s awful but won’t do anything about it. so far this has been my least favorite of anna deavere smith’s shows because i didn’t feel like it has a main central point or topic that was heavily discussed like her other shows. i still love her writing and unique storytelling but i just wanted more out of this show.
September 9, 2020
THE SOCIAL NETWORKS' VICTORY ENCAPSULATED IN HISTORY
Two centuries of American history in two acts. Practically all the dramatic text uttered by actors is quotations of documents, interviews, articles authored by real people in history, starting with the Presidents presented in the play and then many other people, journalists, historians, politicians, etc., who said or wrote something on the concerned presidents or topics.
The trajectory is from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, hence from Jefferson to Jefferson and from the mystery of Jefferson’s black slave mistress to the publicly discussed, impeached, and tried in the Senate Bill Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, the White House intern who became very famous because of this affair which was not an affair, just an evanescent horny episode perfectly exploited by Lewinsky for money and the Republican Party for political advantage, the next president who was to be the son of the previous president defeated by Bill Clinton himself. That’s what revenge is all about.
Between these two alpha and omega presidents, we have two other names of some importance. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, in the order used in the play, anti-chronological, anticlockwise in a way, going back in time.
F.D. Roosevelt brings in the type of relationship that exists between a president and the people in his time. Roosevelt opened up the White House to reporters and he, himself, used the radio with his famous column there, the celebrated Fireside Chats. It was also a time when the relationship with journalists was relaxed and intense, direct, and just cordial, even when critical. Along this line, the author hints at George H. Bush who invited journalists to play bowl at the bowling alley in the White House, and this direct relationship enabled the President to get the benefit of the doubt. And as for that Clinton never had it because he always kept the press and journalists within a rather formal and friendlily distant position, because FDR revealed, and after him all those who used television, that the President had/has become an actor, a plaything in a way, in the hands of the journalists that are going to manipulate him though if the President knows how to play the game he is the real manipulator, but of public opinion through the vain journalists who believe they are manipulating him.
That’s where Lincoln comes into the picture. Lincoln loved the theater and that cost him his life. He was assassinated by a certain Booth within a theater in Washington DC during a play. This assassination is brought up with a piece of writing of Lincoln himself about the dream he had some time before his real assassination. In this dream, he had a premonition of his own assassination and he apparently was bothered by it but did not take extra precautions in his public appearances. That was fatal to him.
FDR was thus the first president to use a modern medium to reach the people directly over the heads, pens, and voices of official journalists. The next innovator in this field will be Kennedy who will use television as his launching stage. He had understood how it worked: the audience must like you totally from the very start, by your tone, look, body language, etc. Kennedy appeared friendly and close. Nixon appeared austere and dry. We know the result: elected for sure but without the popular vote which raises questions. He would have been defeated in any other country that elects their presidents.
But Kennedy is essentially used as one of the three assassinations the author considers were necessary for Nixon to finally be elected in 1968. Three assassinations: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, it took a few more, and first of all Malcolm X. But also, the riots or violent scuffles of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968 and behind it, the full civil rights movement spearheaded by black militants of all affiliations and political colors. The rainbow was within the black movement at the time. Angela Davis soon later will speak of the need for a rainbow coalition. That was coming up with the hippie movement, with films, music, and all sorts of peace and love works of fiction that will bring just one year later Woodstock and after that a tremendous production from Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair to Fritz the Cat and Zabriskie Point. Nixon was elected as a reaction against the Vietnam war based among many voters on the desire to finish it fast, with the racist alternative of George Wallace, and in the wings, the nuclear or atomic alternative of Barry Goldwater was defeated in 1964. In 1969, I remember in North Carolina, after the invasion of Cambodia some of my colleagues at Dunn High School advocating the use of an atom bomb on Hanoi or Haiphong. Nixon was law and order inside, winning the war with its extension in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, and the guarantee – or promise – that nuclear weapons will not be used. Not “peace and love” but “peace and quiet.”
But this Nixon period reduced to that simple element of what is identified as the clowning touch of the presidential function leads us to what came next because the press had moved from credulousness (the president’s words were sacred), to skepticism (always take what the president says with a grain of salt, or maybe two), and to cynicism (the president only tells lies and in fact, they all tell lies. The Polygraph has become the machine of the century under Clinton, and sometime before. And that leads the public to believe that they all lie anyway, and the winners are those who manage to hide their lies from the polygraph, the lie-detecting machine. There is no presumption of innocence, as the author says with Bill Clinton in an interview. It is no longer justice for all. It is no longer Habeas Corpus. It has become: “you are guilty if you cannot prove the accusation against you is false if you cannot disprove the accusation against you. The accuser does not have to prove his point. You have to disprove his point. And Clinton won with “It depends on what the meaning of is is.”
And that brought at the end of the 20th century what is called “moral slippage.” What guides people, and politicians first, is not ethics or morality, the pursuit of good and responsible obligations, but a world upside down. “From robots imitating humans,” we have moved to the reverse “humans imitating robots.” We have totally lost all sense of humor, even black, particularly black, and we do not know what tolerance is anymore: all those who disagree with you are fake-news-mongers, enemies of the people, hoax-disseminators. The world is nothing but a big basket in which hundreds of spiders are locked up and each spider is one plotting theory. History is nothing but plotting all around, plots after plots.
Clinton developed the Information Highways and out life has become dominated, governed, possessed by Information and Communication Technology and the author is so right when she concludes: “We’re more and more into communicationS and less and less into communicationØ.” The former is a technology that gives the machine authority and power with Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. The latter is the in-person direct exchange of facts, data, and ideas between two or just a few people in one place at one time. Is a videoconference on Skype communicationØ or communicationS? Marshall McLuhan has written several volumes on the subject and you can be sure that Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Information & communicationS Technology are not the extension of our mind, but the extension of the mind of a narrow elite to control and dominate, in one word to manipulate the masses. But that is no opium, you know. You can step out of it in one minute and a half, 90 seconds, 6 times 15 seconds, etc. Maybe one day our school system will bring information-&-communications-literacy to children as soon as they can use a smartphone. But we will have to learn how to be smarter than our smartphones.
This play is thus a play about the progressive emergence of the maximum technological alienation of people, meaning their being alienated by the technology they use more and more, and that surrounds them all the time.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Two centuries of American history in two acts. Practically all the dramatic text uttered by actors is quotations of documents, interviews, articles authored by real people in history, starting with the Presidents presented in the play and then many other people, journalists, historians, politicians, etc., who said or wrote something on the concerned presidents or topics.
The trajectory is from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, hence from Jefferson to Jefferson and from the mystery of Jefferson’s black slave mistress to the publicly discussed, impeached, and tried in the Senate Bill Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, the White House intern who became very famous because of this affair which was not an affair, just an evanescent horny episode perfectly exploited by Lewinsky for money and the Republican Party for political advantage, the next president who was to be the son of the previous president defeated by Bill Clinton himself. That’s what revenge is all about.
Between these two alpha and omega presidents, we have two other names of some importance. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, in the order used in the play, anti-chronological, anticlockwise in a way, going back in time.
F.D. Roosevelt brings in the type of relationship that exists between a president and the people in his time. Roosevelt opened up the White House to reporters and he, himself, used the radio with his famous column there, the celebrated Fireside Chats. It was also a time when the relationship with journalists was relaxed and intense, direct, and just cordial, even when critical. Along this line, the author hints at George H. Bush who invited journalists to play bowl at the bowling alley in the White House, and this direct relationship enabled the President to get the benefit of the doubt. And as for that Clinton never had it because he always kept the press and journalists within a rather formal and friendlily distant position, because FDR revealed, and after him all those who used television, that the President had/has become an actor, a plaything in a way, in the hands of the journalists that are going to manipulate him though if the President knows how to play the game he is the real manipulator, but of public opinion through the vain journalists who believe they are manipulating him.
That’s where Lincoln comes into the picture. Lincoln loved the theater and that cost him his life. He was assassinated by a certain Booth within a theater in Washington DC during a play. This assassination is brought up with a piece of writing of Lincoln himself about the dream he had some time before his real assassination. In this dream, he had a premonition of his own assassination and he apparently was bothered by it but did not take extra precautions in his public appearances. That was fatal to him.
FDR was thus the first president to use a modern medium to reach the people directly over the heads, pens, and voices of official journalists. The next innovator in this field will be Kennedy who will use television as his launching stage. He had understood how it worked: the audience must like you totally from the very start, by your tone, look, body language, etc. Kennedy appeared friendly and close. Nixon appeared austere and dry. We know the result: elected for sure but without the popular vote which raises questions. He would have been defeated in any other country that elects their presidents.
But Kennedy is essentially used as one of the three assassinations the author considers were necessary for Nixon to finally be elected in 1968. Three assassinations: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, it took a few more, and first of all Malcolm X. But also, the riots or violent scuffles of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968 and behind it, the full civil rights movement spearheaded by black militants of all affiliations and political colors. The rainbow was within the black movement at the time. Angela Davis soon later will speak of the need for a rainbow coalition. That was coming up with the hippie movement, with films, music, and all sorts of peace and love works of fiction that will bring just one year later Woodstock and after that a tremendous production from Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair to Fritz the Cat and Zabriskie Point. Nixon was elected as a reaction against the Vietnam war based among many voters on the desire to finish it fast, with the racist alternative of George Wallace, and in the wings, the nuclear or atomic alternative of Barry Goldwater was defeated in 1964. In 1969, I remember in North Carolina, after the invasion of Cambodia some of my colleagues at Dunn High School advocating the use of an atom bomb on Hanoi or Haiphong. Nixon was law and order inside, winning the war with its extension in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, and the guarantee – or promise – that nuclear weapons will not be used. Not “peace and love” but “peace and quiet.”
But this Nixon period reduced to that simple element of what is identified as the clowning touch of the presidential function leads us to what came next because the press had moved from credulousness (the president’s words were sacred), to skepticism (always take what the president says with a grain of salt, or maybe two), and to cynicism (the president only tells lies and in fact, they all tell lies. The Polygraph has become the machine of the century under Clinton, and sometime before. And that leads the public to believe that they all lie anyway, and the winners are those who manage to hide their lies from the polygraph, the lie-detecting machine. There is no presumption of innocence, as the author says with Bill Clinton in an interview. It is no longer justice for all. It is no longer Habeas Corpus. It has become: “you are guilty if you cannot prove the accusation against you is false if you cannot disprove the accusation against you. The accuser does not have to prove his point. You have to disprove his point. And Clinton won with “It depends on what the meaning of is is.”
And that brought at the end of the 20th century what is called “moral slippage.” What guides people, and politicians first, is not ethics or morality, the pursuit of good and responsible obligations, but a world upside down. “From robots imitating humans,” we have moved to the reverse “humans imitating robots.” We have totally lost all sense of humor, even black, particularly black, and we do not know what tolerance is anymore: all those who disagree with you are fake-news-mongers, enemies of the people, hoax-disseminators. The world is nothing but a big basket in which hundreds of spiders are locked up and each spider is one plotting theory. History is nothing but plotting all around, plots after plots.
Clinton developed the Information Highways and out life has become dominated, governed, possessed by Information and Communication Technology and the author is so right when she concludes: “We’re more and more into communicationS and less and less into communicationØ.” The former is a technology that gives the machine authority and power with Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. The latter is the in-person direct exchange of facts, data, and ideas between two or just a few people in one place at one time. Is a videoconference on Skype communicationØ or communicationS? Marshall McLuhan has written several volumes on the subject and you can be sure that Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Information & communicationS Technology are not the extension of our mind, but the extension of the mind of a narrow elite to control and dominate, in one word to manipulate the masses. But that is no opium, you know. You can step out of it in one minute and a half, 90 seconds, 6 times 15 seconds, etc. Maybe one day our school system will bring information-&-communications-literacy to children as soon as they can use a smartphone. But we will have to learn how to be smarter than our smartphones.
This play is thus a play about the progressive emergence of the maximum technological alienation of people, meaning their being alienated by the technology they use more and more, and that surrounds them all the time.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
October 25, 2022
[This was written when the book was published in 2000]:
Anna Deavere Smith has got us pegged. The stories, vignettes, and interviews that comprise her new one-woman play House Arrest are chillingly revelatory: whether she's portraying documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, lecturing us earnestly and fatuously about the evils of slavery ("I submit if you were asked to do that you might try it on for twenty minutes."); or New York Law School legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, musing about the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings affair ("I haven't seen it written anywhere but there's a suggestion that, well, maybe, maybe he was gay..."); or Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter's regaling us with an anecdote about how Bill Clinton made a beeline to Ellen and Anne at some recent hoity-toity political gathering ("He knows where he's going. And he can't make it too obvious..."); Smith is showing us a scary truth: this is the nation we have become.
The subtitle of House Arrest is "A Search for American Character in and around the White House." It suggests that she's going after the Presidents of the United States, especially the current one, whose character has come under such scrutiny during these past several years. And sure, Mr. Clinton (and Mr. Roosevelt, whose affair with Missy Hands was such an open secret; and Mr. Jefferson, whose affair with Sally Hemings has been speculated upon for, literally, centuries) are absolutely called on the carpet here. But the real subject of House Arrest is the American Character, period; and Smith has zeroed in on it with remarkable insight and accuracy.
Her search has brought her--and now, thanks to this miraculous, important work of theater, brings us--face to face with an ugly reality: we have become a nation of observers, bombarded (and bombarding each other) with trivia, incapable of rousing ourselves to action. This play, for which Smith interviewed hundreds of Americans, celebrated and otherwise, about their feelings about the presidency and the media, takes us right to the heart of today's American Tragedy. We see it in the horrifying story of a young crack addict who watches as her boyfriend beats her daughter to death. We see it in the appalling farce of Monicagate, as a prosecutor asks President Clinton "If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid with her in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?" And we see it--expressed with chilling succinctness--in the words of news photographer Brian Palmer, who tells us that his job is to be there in case the unmentionable happens: "I mean just in case POTUS gets, you know, POTUS gets waxed." (POTUS, he explains, means President-of-the-United-States.)
House Arrest is an important play precisely because it raises these questions. And many, many more--all provocative, all compelling, all resonant. Smith has brought the collective wisdom of the likes of Ben Bradlee, Studs Turkel, Ed Bradley, Anita Hill, George Bush, and others to House Arrest. You won't agree with everything these people have to say, but you need to hear them: this work captures the cynical, defeated spirit of our country at the turn of the millennium with such painful fidelity that it demands to be seen.
Anna Deavere Smith has got us pegged. The stories, vignettes, and interviews that comprise her new one-woman play House Arrest are chillingly revelatory: whether she's portraying documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, lecturing us earnestly and fatuously about the evils of slavery ("I submit if you were asked to do that you might try it on for twenty minutes."); or New York Law School legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, musing about the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings affair ("I haven't seen it written anywhere but there's a suggestion that, well, maybe, maybe he was gay..."); or Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter's regaling us with an anecdote about how Bill Clinton made a beeline to Ellen and Anne at some recent hoity-toity political gathering ("He knows where he's going. And he can't make it too obvious..."); Smith is showing us a scary truth: this is the nation we have become.
The subtitle of House Arrest is "A Search for American Character in and around the White House." It suggests that she's going after the Presidents of the United States, especially the current one, whose character has come under such scrutiny during these past several years. And sure, Mr. Clinton (and Mr. Roosevelt, whose affair with Missy Hands was such an open secret; and Mr. Jefferson, whose affair with Sally Hemings has been speculated upon for, literally, centuries) are absolutely called on the carpet here. But the real subject of House Arrest is the American Character, period; and Smith has zeroed in on it with remarkable insight and accuracy.
Her search has brought her--and now, thanks to this miraculous, important work of theater, brings us--face to face with an ugly reality: we have become a nation of observers, bombarded (and bombarding each other) with trivia, incapable of rousing ourselves to action. This play, for which Smith interviewed hundreds of Americans, celebrated and otherwise, about their feelings about the presidency and the media, takes us right to the heart of today's American Tragedy. We see it in the horrifying story of a young crack addict who watches as her boyfriend beats her daughter to death. We see it in the appalling farce of Monicagate, as a prosecutor asks President Clinton "If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid with her in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?" And we see it--expressed with chilling succinctness--in the words of news photographer Brian Palmer, who tells us that his job is to be there in case the unmentionable happens: "I mean just in case POTUS gets, you know, POTUS gets waxed." (POTUS, he explains, means President-of-the-United-States.)
House Arrest is an important play precisely because it raises these questions. And many, many more--all provocative, all compelling, all resonant. Smith has brought the collective wisdom of the likes of Ben Bradlee, Studs Turkel, Ed Bradley, Anita Hill, George Bush, and others to House Arrest. You won't agree with everything these people have to say, but you need to hear them: this work captures the cynical, defeated spirit of our country at the turn of the millennium with such painful fidelity that it demands to be seen.
March 3, 2020
Per usual, Anna Deavere Smith's gathered some great stories for this installment of her theater of reportage but this "White House"-themed batch doesn't quite congeal like her other dramatic compilations. The historic texts (Whitman, Jefferson, etc.) are jarringly formal while a few contemporary monologues have no direct relationship to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at all. This piece premiered during the Clinton administration so I'm guessing the interconnections were clearer when this show first debuted.
September 27, 2020
Really interesting structure! I would love to see it performed
January 22, 2020
House Arrest is still as relevant as ever today, in the era of our celebrity, bigot so-called president.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews