WITH THEIR EYES, THEIR EARS, THEIR BODIES, THEIR HEALTHY SKEPTICISM, AND THEIR HEARTS 

by Anna Deveare Smith

April 28, 2002

When I was told that the students of Stuyvesant High had used a theater-making technique that I developed, to create a play about the events of September 11, 2001, I couldn’t have been more flattered. They saw what I could not see. While they were witnessing this history firsthand, I was on a runway at La Guardia Airport, seeing it from afar, as a small puff of smoke. Eventually I, like others around the world, would be dependent on the storytelling of others—the media, or the stories of those who were close enough to see it with their own eyes. Even as I write this, eight months later, many of us are still hearing and learning particulars of that story. 

Stuyvesant High School is just four blocks from Ground Zero. Under the direction of an English teacher, Annie Thoms, these students did an original and generous thing in the wake of September 11, 2001. Some went to volunteer or the Red Cross, others took care of their friends, and some tried to give blood. But these students did something more, and something that most of the nation has yet to do, even now, eight months later. They immediately started to create history, and they immediately started to create art. 

Recording history and making art might not seem like major strokes on a canvas full of great things that were done—the work of the fire department, the police department, Mayor Giuliani, the President, his cabinet, those who helped neighbors, strangers, those who risked their lives, the journalists who have written stories, the journalists who, for The New York Times for example, committed to telling every story of every person who was killed, those who have given money, and others too numerous to mention. What does it mean, then, that these high school students set out to create art, as I say, and to record history on the cusp of a national emergency, an emergency that rocked the nation, and leaves us, even now, quaking? 

One of the places I visited in the several days immediately following September 11th was the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I stopped several people who were entering, and asked what it was they hoped to find in the museum at such a time. One man told me that art has survived war, famine, floods. Art that manages to do so, art that successfully reveals and captures the spirit of its time—the spirit of violence and terror, as well as the spirit of love and celebration—lasts for centuries. 

And then what about history? We all know the value of history. Histories are being written about the events of September 11th. Journalism itself is, as we know, history’s first draft. The great histories, like the great works of art, will be created after much contemplation, some long after all of us who experienced it are deceased. In fact, the great histories and great works of art will require months, years, decades, centuries of reflection. What’s special about this particular history and this particular art? This particular history is written not just with the eyes, but with the ears and the bodies of these young students. It is critical that they have written this history precisely because it is their history, and a history for their world and their future. We, some of us, who have the authority to speak for many, nonetheless will depend on these teenagers to create the world of the future. How will they bring humanity through its greatest present challenge: the challenge of how to guarantee the survival of the human race through a dramatically fractious time, and a time with enormous technological resources, but very poor human ones? This history, with all its details, all its particulars, is important. A year from now, ten years from now, the particulars will be erased. It is the erasure of particulars that has, in fact, fostered the kind of coarse segmentation of societies that we have. It is the erasure of particulars that causes us to look at the world in black and white. The very fact that these students were asked to listen for particulars is a first step to making the world a more habitable place. 

My generation has created a world where we are rewarded for talk. Look at television any hour of the day and you will see a parade of talk, because talk, you see, is cheaper for television producers to make than fiction. Very little in our society celebrates listening. That these students, with the aid of their teacher and their tape recorders, were required, ultimately, to listen to this talk with all its unfinished sentences, its “uhs,” “ums,” and “you knows,” is already an advance. Could it be that a first step is to create a generation of listeners? You who are reading may be tempted to skip over those “uhs” and “ums” to get to “the point.” Know that when you do that, you miss the point. The point is that each individual has a particular story to tell, and the story is more than words: the story is its rhythms and its breaths. Notice how articulate everyone becomes when we give our attention to much more than “the point.” Listen to the words of a freshman, Katie Berringer, as she describes what it was like to go to another school while Stuyvesant was being restored: 

"It was kinda like everybody was a freshman." 

 And indeed, in those days, all of us New Yorkers, whether we were stuck atairports, required to walk miles home from work, smelling that smell that permeated the air for weeks, or reflecting suddenly on our mortality, both individual and national—everybody was, as this young student says in her own particularly eloquent way, “a freshman.” 

This [play] is a blueprint. What these students ultimately did was to make a play in which they played the parts of these individual speakers. They were compelled, then, to empathize with these individuals, to put themselves in another person’s words the way, in the past, we have thought metaphorically of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. Could it be that a first step is to create a  generation of leaders who can empathize? Could it be that empathy can even serve as a defense against that which could harm us? “Keep your enemies as close as your friends,” they used to say. Could it be that we should pour resources into creating laboratories where we learn about human communication with the same seriousness that we study fiber-optic communication? 

So, these acting, linguistic historians at Stuyvesant High, a high school perhaps much like any other high school in 2002 where youngsters can stay within their safety zones, dared to wear and learn and embody the words of others—fellow students, their teachers, the staff. One of the building staff was in charge of getting things back in order, when he noticed that a particularly important part of the school was missing: 

But tryin’ to get 

the building back into sorts . . . 

okay 

and one of the things that I noticed 

on the stage 

was the base 

of the flag 

and no flag. 

So I, I was lookin’ all over the building for the flag and I couldn’t find it. 

I wondered, when I read that, how many students took note of that flag before September 11th. I’m sure they do now. Even in a time of devotion to our country, these students found a key part of what makes America great. What is key to our greatness is that we always find time, room, space, venue, for critique. What is key to our greatness is a diversity of ideas and the spirit of debate. 

A senior, Max Willens, spoke with great passion, and in a very articulate way, about something that has been permeating our culture for the last decade—and that is our tendency to make a circus out of that which is in front of us, to make a spectacle. And yet, the benefit of this critique, and the benefit of having it in a play, is that it can be cause for discussion. A live performance gives us what television news never will. It gives us the opportunity, in the flesh, to respond. 

We can also break the conventions of some audiences. The job of an audience can be not just to applaud and say congratulations, but to have real dialogue. This young man’s opinion of those who came to pay respects, if enacted by an actor elsewhere, would be, and it should be, a great point of discussion and disagreement. As such, it would create a special kind of community around its recitation—a thinking, analytical community. 

There were people there all the time, 

and they weren’t even New Yorkers, 

they weren’t even people visiting some, you know, 

taking a look at something that used to be there, 

something that they used to know. 

They were people from Kansas and Oklahoma, and, you know, 

Missouri, who had seen those places on postcards. 

And they wanted to buy hats and pins, 

and wanted to sing “God Bless America” and things like that. 

Which made me sick. 

The pictures, 

the pictures were probably what really did it for me. 

There were these disposable cameras, 

the kind that people, you know, 

whip out for trips to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon, you know, 

those yellow plastic things, you know, 

where everyone crowds around and the flashes make those little annoying 

yellow sounds. 

And I had to, I dunno . . . 

one time, someone actually asked me to take a photograph of them, 

of them looking, 

kind of standing in a solemn pose with the wreckage as a backdrop, 

and I couldn’t do it. 

I nearly threw the camera at them, I just . . . 

I couldn’t . . . 

it made me sick. 

A play is not alive until human breath takes on the words. I hope that people around the country, and indeed around the world, whether fifth graders, twelfth graders, college students, adult community theater groups, church groups, orPTAs, produce this play, and say the words of those from Stuyvesant High who saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, in their particular way. 

We have here one of the very ironies of history. Eventually, those particulars, which are so critical in the moment, so critical to our individuality, wash out over time. Centuries from now, hard as it is to believe, some high school in a foreign land will struggle to play a play like this one, wondering what in the world an expression like “like” means, or, for that matter, “dunno.” Centuries from now, even our enemies, those who currently threaten our existence, might play such a play. And centuries from now, we might play such a play with their history. 

This is what has happened, over time. The Greeks, the Romans, the Africans, the Asians—all over the world, the plays of wars and famines, and victories, the plays of sad dark days, and the plays of better years, better celebrations, have been played, have outlasted the very disputes that inspired them. I say to all of you young students, who might speak these words out of your own attempt to understand what it must have felt like to be so near this tragic, terrifying, heartrending moment: Be strong. Be new. Be you. 

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH 

Actress, Playwright, Professor 

Director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue 

New York University 

April 28, 2002