Anna Deavere Smith on the PBS Premiere of Let Me Down Easy and Her Life as a Theatrical 'Nomad'

Good news for theater fans who missed the 2009 off-Broadway production (and subsequent national tour) of Let Me Down Easy: Anna Deavere Smith’s tour-de-force solo show, which examines America’s health care debate through the voices of 19 real-life characters, is coming to PBS’ Great Performances on January 13. Smith was filmed live at Washington’s Arena Stage in February 2011.

“It’s not just about health care, it’s about social justice,” Smith told Broadway.com of her still-timely show. “As an economic matter, doctors will tell you that this is a problem that’s not going to go away. That’s one reason I made this play—hoping it would spark a discussion beyond politics.”

In Let Me Down Easy, Smith channels cancer patients Lance Armstrong, Texas governor Ann Richards and movie critic Joel Siegel, as well as doctors, religious leaders and others who comment on healing, faith and mortality. “They were all hard to get right,” she says of her characters, “but I worked extra hard on three people: a woman who tells a chilling story of her daughter on dialysis, Lance Armstrong and [’60s supermodel] Lauren Hutton. She was difficult because she moves nonstop; it’s almost like she is painting herself. But, thank god, she saw the show twice and liked it.”

Smith chuckles at the “synchronicity” of starring in a solo performance about health care while playing a hospital administrator in the Showtime series Nurse Jackie. “As an artist, the two things feed off each other,” she says of combining TV and theater, adding, “I’m happy to be part of the popular culture because it creates a different audience for what I do.”

A tireless researcher and interviewer, Smith is currently shaping material that didn’t make the cut in Let Me Down Easy into a new piece on the subject of grace, which will debut at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. “I’m an itinerant worker, and I never know when there’s going to be a crop,” she jokes of her varied career. “My New Year’s card was a photo of me with two Bedouins taken in Petra, that wonderful archeological site in the [Jordan] desert. It’s me with two nomads, because that’s what I am: nomadic.”