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

Anna Deavere Smith, a pioneer of documentary or verbatim theater, examines the intersection of personal identity and American history. Her latest work, *Basil Biggs*, chronicles the life of her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who managed the reburial of Union soldiers at Gettysburg. This project marks a departure from her signature verbatim style, as she reconstructs a narrative without primary source documents. Smith identifies the "rhythms" and "disrupted sentences" in human speech to capture the essence of a character, a technique honed through decades of interviewing diverse subjects for plays like *Let Me Down Easy* and *Notes from the Field*. The program also reviews *Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness*, a sketch comedy series starring Larry David that satirizes American historical milestones through a series of irreverent, scripted vignettes.