Building an Arresting ‘House’

The Mark Taper Forum’s Saturday matinee audience wasn’t like an opening-night crowd, for starters. Fewer donors, fewer suits, a higher than usual number of Toyota owners--I could just tell--and in general not as many theater-ambivalents, film and television industry people giving off those studied vibes of reluctance about being at the theater in the first place.

The audience for Anna Deavere Smith’s “House Arrest: An Introgression” was more diverse and actively engaged than any I’ve seen at a major L.A. theatrical venue this year. The piece itself, subtitled a “work in progress,” was made available to critics only in its final performances over the weekend, of its 10-day run. It may have been a sprawl, a mess, even. It’s like 17 Smith projects jammed into one tentatively deconstructed package. But it had something going for it.

The two-hour show featured Smith and a company of 12, followed by “Act 2,” which was a souped-up post-play discussion. However inchoate, “House Arrest” got a roomful thinking about the press, the presidency, official and unofficial versions of American history, and America’s lifelong fissure, the racial divide.

The writer-director’s best-known solo works, “Fires in the Mirror” (triggered by the Brooklyn Crown Heights riots) and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (“Our Town,” after Rodney King), started small and expanded outward. Using verbatim interview text, giving voice to those above and below the official media radar, Smith found wit and beauty in the microcosm. “Twilight,” especially, proved a rare instance of the right artist doing the right project at the right time. (In L.A., at least, before the show got slicked up for Broadway.) “House Arrest” is a macro-minded piece still searching for its most telling specifics, its grounding points.

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Smith and her ensemble in “House Arrest” re-create the words (and in tricky degrees of stylization, the delivery) of Bill Clinton likening himself to a Baby Huey doll, beaten down by the press but popping back up yet again (and this was before the Lewinsky revelation!). Oral historian and liberal superhero Studs Terkel bemoans the country’s “moral slippage.” Various members of the White House press corps reveal varying degrees of hypocrisy; we also hear from academics, prison guards and others.

This material is mix-mastered with voices and images of the past. Smith is keenly interested in reminding audiences that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln weren’t humanist saints, as they’re often depicted. Performance excerpts from “Our American Cousin,” seen by Lincoln on his final night at the theater, bump up against a fantasy fashion show live from Monticello, with various mixed-race couples (Jefferson and Sally Heming, O.J. and Nicole) hitting the runway of history.

Much of it is provocative, though less of “House Arrest” sticks than you’d like. Smith can’t get her arms around all she wants to here. If anything, you want this show to explode, to revel in the cacophony of voices and warring histories Smith hears coming from America, then and now. (The “Our American Cousin” segments make me think she’d find an ideal collaborator in playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, whose “America Play” covered similar ground more obliquely.)

As is, we scoot from Walt Whitman to church bombings to spirituals to dance interludes choreographed by Donald Byrd, primarily for the charismatic and splendidly expressive Francesca Harper. Violinist Regina Carter is a valuable addition to this crew as well. Some of the acting, particularly that of Crispin Freeman, is callow and shallow, pointing up the more obvious intentions of “House Arrest” (that is, to knock major historical figures down a few pegs). The best performers, however, and Smith is chief among them, get at something deeper.

When Smith uses the “work-in-progress” label, it’s utterly warranted. “House Arrest” may be an overstuffed sociopolitical spree, dressed up with a post-show discussion. But it has a sense--albeit erratic and unfocused--of scope. The country’s problems deserve that, at least.