Reflecting on Education and Incarceration

This is Fresh air. I'm Tanya Moseley. My guest today, actor and playwright Anna DeVere Smith, has played a national security advisor on the West Wing, a matriarch on Blackish, and a magazine editor on invventing Anna. But for more than fifty years, the work she keeps returning to is America itself Smith pioneered what we now call documentary or verbatim theater. She interviews people, sometimes hundreds of them, caught inside a national fracture like a riot or epidemic. And then she stands alone on a stage and performs their exact words In her nineteen ninety two play Fires in the Mirror, she became Crown Heights Brooklyn in the aftermath of a deadly racial conflict In Twilight, Los Angeles, nineteen ninety two, she became the city in the days after the Rotney King verdict And in her twenty sixteen play Notes F fromom the Field, she examined the school to prison pipeline Here she is as Leticia D Santiago, a parent from Stockton, California on the lengths she takes to keep her kids out of trouble And I think I was a very strict mother anythingything Involving my kids, I was very involved. used to even go all nightime and some mail them Yes, o yes, Yes to see if they were not drinking or smoking? Oh yes. but there's so many things to keep my kids out of trouble and thanks to the Lw. I think I did a good job Anna Deveere Smith's new play turns that lens on her own family. Basil Bigs premis this month in Philadelphia, written for the nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary The title character is her great, great grandfather, a free black man who became a prominent Gettysburg figure and a conductor of the underground raailroad, helping to lead enslaved people to freedom Smith first learned about him a decade ago while appearing on PBS's Finding Your Roots withith Henry Louis Gates Junr. In this clip, Gates explains the remarkable role Bigs played in the war's aftermath Now this obituary, Anna is for Celia Biggs Pen Basil'saughter. died in nineteen thirty six And it gives us a sense of what your ancestors did in the faateful days right before the battle Mrs. Penn Last of kin who fled sixty three battle dies The only colored persons in this section, the Biggs family was warned to leave this section with the approach of the Confederate troops. Okay, soow ancestors fled. Unbelievable, the Confederate invasion. Now remember it's a three days of combat, right? R Basil's farm was converted into a field hospital by the Confederates My God, that's a story right there. That's an amazing play Anna DeVre Smith, welcome back to F fresh air Thank you for having me. That moment that we just heard, I think the audience, if they watch it, I think we all came to the same conclusion at the same time, including you that it is a play and now it is exactly a play. Take us to that moment Sure well so That was me with my friend, Skip. AKA Henry Lewis Gates junior And u It was a very powerful moment, I have to say But maybe what's equally as interesting is that I did nothing about it That was in twenty fourteen, when it aired on PBS, my family raced off to Gettysburg and that would be my generation of cousins and sisters rushed off and for some reason I couldn't go. I mean, you know, I am artist, I'm nomadic. I go from pillar to post And the only thing that was in the way, other gigs, That's what was in the way. And then Kathy Sachs, who is an extraordinary philanthropist and arts collector has been putting together a remarkable festival of arts here in Philadelphia, which is where I am right now called What Now And she asked me to write something for it. And because it was for the two hundred fiftieth anniversary and because it was in Pennsylvania, I thought, oh, This is the time for me to write about Basil Bigs What's a detail about Basil's life that completely surprised you? I mean, the entire story is pretty remarkable, but What was something that really stuck with you? Well, five years I would say a sort of very pertinent and revolutionary discovery was that he could not read and write And neither could my great great grandmother, Mary Jackson Biggs. which meant that I had nothing to go on in his words, no diaries, no letters Now, that wouldn't seem unusual for black people at that time The way I've worked for fifty years is to study every single notot just word, but utterance that a person makes in order to put together an American story. So I had no document, nothing documentary to go on. I had photographs. That was it And of course You know, the Civil warar has been written about extensively as has the Battle of Gettysburg So I could sort of put together the facts of the era But I have not I don't have a word out of the mouth of my great great grandfather or his children So this called for me to leave my documentary form. It allows me to still be the Americanist that I believe I am. But I had to do a different kind of writing, a different kind of inquiry How did you bring him to life? I was really terrified honestly, you know, staring at the blank page. I'd had a fabulous time at Gettysburg, you know It made great friends there Absolutely home and Gettysburg spent a lot of time in the archives. But I still didn't know How to put the words on paper and what best thing that happened was that I had been able to visit the farm his first farm in Gettysburg. The farm is still there, the house is still there. The barn is still there, The creek is still there. and we believe that that's where he did a lot of his underground railroad activity. This is the house that was taken over by the Confederates and turned into the Confederate hospital. There is still blood on the floor Walking around the barn, walking around the farm really gave me the rooting that I needed to start writing. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had a chance to walk around that farm. And so it's also interesting that especially for a black man of that era, all three of the houses that he lived in Gettysburg are still standing He is the reason Lincoln. had ground to stand on in that fateful November, he re buried the union dead, right? so that the cemetery could be dedicated so that the Gettysburg address could be delivered That's right. And the underground Railroad also obviously, is a story that one has to put together shreds for. It's underground, right? But the reason that he's commemorated now, the reason he's honored now in Gettysburg, What happened was that when word got out that the Confederates were coming to Gettysburg. You now we think about these things and of course, you go to the battlefield. But you know it was a farm town, right? And um When word was out that the Confederates were coming, Black people had every reason to believe that they were going to be snatched and taken back to the South, whether they were free or not. This had happened, a massive invasion and raid had happened nearby in Chambersburg So my great great grandfather his family, my great great grandmother and the children away When they came back Really just a few days later The farm had been taken over by the Confederates they had plan the house as their hospital And I believe that my that Basil Biggs had lost everything. I mean, he couldn't read and write, but he was very entrepreneurial. He had a robust farm. He had a good business as a veterinarian And I think that he took the grizzly job of disinterring the union deb and reburying them and cleaning up The seven thousand dead bodies a group of other black men that he brought together I believe that he did that because he was broke. Now, it could be that, you know, he had a huge civic responsibility, I'm not sure. But they started that in October and they had it In good enough shape by November, when Lincoln came to consecrate what becomes the National Soldier' Cemetery, It was it was possible to do. The irony is that at least then Black Union soldiers were not buried in that cemetery. And so Basil Biggs was a part of an organization called The Sons of Goodwill who created a separate cemetery at that time for the Black Union dead Did you ever consider playing bigigs yourself like a one woman show because this is a traditional play with a cast of actors. I'm very excited about these actors and this the whole part of casting the play was huge, you know, trying to find who would play these characters. And one actor walked in and looked exactly like my cousin, Basil Biggs and like my brother And there's a scene in the play that is just a real sort of contentious moment between Basil and this young man called Calvin And I have to tell you I just burst out crying in the auditions a sobbing because it just reminded me of discord between my brother and my father And I made a very intentional decision in nineteen eighty when many of us who were not heterosexual presenting males were enncourageed, not just invited, but encourage to write about ourselves. And I made the opposite move. And I said, I'm not going to write about myself, not going to write about my family I'm going to chase America in terms of that, which is not me. And I did that for fifty years And so to have this kind of homecoming is very powerful in so many ways. And I think to see it outside of myself rather than trying to embody it is part of the power. This is Fresh air and today I am talking with actor and playwright Anna DeVre Smith play Basil Bigs, traces the life of her great great grandfather in the Civil War era Gettysburg It premieres this month at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, written for the nation's two hundred fiftieth anniversary Smith was born in Baltimore in nineteen fifty and came up through the theater as a classically trained actor Somewhere along the way, she set down a different path. Instead of playing invented characters, she started turning a tape recorder on real Americans and performing their exact words, becoming a pioneer of what we now call documentary or verbatim theater Anna, I want to talk a little bit about verbatim theater because you came up, as I said, as an actor, and then you did this unusual thing instead of looking for roles, you started collecting people. What sparked that shift and You know, I think everything starts with a question And I feel, for example that Education should be about us discovering our questions rather than seeking answers And I had that extraordinary opportunity in a Shakespeare class when I first started studying acting, I didn't really Again, that pursuit until I was twenty two years old And our Shakespeare teacher on the first day, and I was very worried about Shakespeare class, And it's about speaking Shakespeare. It's not Shakespeare' scholarship made this particular suggestion that we expect the rhythm of Shakespeare to be like this d what we call ambic pentameter. And she suggested in her argument that when we are trying to speak Shakespeare, we just speak the words as they aret written, right? We don't add extra emotion or anything In making that argument, she said, But If there is and upside down rhythm. in the second beat This tells you It's something is awry with the character. So little up other beats called a trokey. So if the if the rhythm goes da dada That means there's something Unsettled And she gave the example end of the play King Lear when Lear has lost everything And he says Never, never, never, never, never. everythingverything's upside down So when I was in the conservatory, I was trying to figure out Did that happen How could emotions be captured in rhythms And I decided that I would see If I could listen in real life to how people's rhythms changed and if those changes would be indicative not only of disarray in a story that individual was telling me, but also in the world around them. This is one of those random things. I was at a cocktail party and standing next to like a wallflower, another woman was standing next to me And she asked me what I did, What was my work? And I never to this day say I'm an actor. Like even on a plane, if somebody says, what do you do? I never say I'm an actor because then you have that V veryy embarrassing question, Well, what have I seen you in so right? Yeah But So I said I said, well, I'm trying to learn something about Imagine at a cocktail party, I'm trying to learn something about language and identity And I said, and I'm trying to figure out how to get people to break their linguistic patterns when they speak. And she said, Well, I'm a linguist. And she said, I'm going to give you three questions That will guarantee this can happen in the course of an hour And the questions were, have you ever come close to death Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do and Do you know the circumstances of your birth? And so the first show that I made was with other actors. I only played one part I literally walked up to people on the streets of New York or wherever they were. and I said U I know an actor who looks like you if you'll give me an hour of your time I will invite you to see yourself perform. This was in nineteen eighty. And so I talked to the lifeguard at the gym I talked to the lady up the street who had a secondhand clothes store. I talked to somebody who was in a fancy beauty parlor And I made a show in which I would talk to somebody for an hour about whatever they want to talk about. hair you know, swimming lanes and somewhere in that, I would ask those questions. and lo and behold their language took on these different patterns. And so I trained myself how to listen by doing that And then when you think about it, since I've gone to do plays about things that are upside down, are in disarray, are not ambic pentameters, but are trochies then it is the case that people speak in Disrupted sentences. and they struggle to make sense, which means that they actually make these gorgeous, as far as I'm concerned, sort of architectures of language. And I'm very interested in those things I will call them those moments, and that's what I perform I'm sure you've heard a lot of people say, o, that takes a lot of bravery for you to just walk up to people on the street and just ask them questions. What were those early responses to you? Because you weren't talking to people on behalf of, say, a news organization or something tangible specific that people know that this would go toward Well, I think, you know, It was kind of a curious thing, right? for some girl too. You know ask you V that or I was doing a lot of temp work at the time And the person I performed was Julia. who was at JC Pennney. We worked in a basement. My desk was right next to hers. and I would hear Julia talking on the phone And I said, of God. interview with you. So So I'd know in advance, you know, of somebody who I thought was very, very interesting. And I think because nobody had ever asked them before. And by the way, this isn't like now where people are going around taking selfies and pictures of each other. This is when my tape recorder was, you know, it was like this panic thing that was probably almost a foot long Yeah, right. So people weren't walking around with iPhones that they could record on. So I think it was like this odd thing a rather charming girl asking them to do. And they said yes. My own curiosity, what was so interesting about Julia on the phone at JC Pinney She she was just like, you know, she was one of those people who was She was so Oh, she had a story about someomebody who just had a meltdown on a bus going through the tunnel, the Lincoln tunnel in in New York and she as often was so beautiful about in particular, is she acted out like all the people Right So that was so great, you know And I'll have to tell you another sort of epiphany I had about Julia. So I said, I only played one part in that play was Julia And she came, it was so exciting to see the people come to see themselves performed in this loft in New York and Julia waited for me with her friends And as we werere walking down Leonard Street and her friend, Julia, girl You would a stargirl It would a star. And I thought, yeah, the character should be the star not the actor, right? And so I mean, she just was one of those black women with a great sense of humor and a great ability to tell a story I'll see this story. Okaykay. I was wondering you know, A lot of your performances remind me of an oral tradition I know some black households have, like the way people slide in and out of imitating others to kind of drive a point home. Did you see that growing up? What was the storytelling? Oh ye. I mean Miss Johnson next door who Uh, weigh one hundred pounds, couldn't move very far and would you know give me twenty five cents to go down buy her some fat back from the grocery store Mr. Zalman's grocery store. and then, you know, I would sit on her porch and hear a story and she had And my maternal grandfather who married Virginia Bigs was a fantastic storyteller So as was my maternal grandmother. So I I'd do anything for a story when I was little. and you're right. there's that oral tradition. and my aunt Esther is the first person I ever interviewed Um sitting in her kitchen all my life. I listened to her, but I The first actual interview I did knowing that I wanted to create this kind of theater I tested it out on Eester Our guest today is actor and playwright Anna DeVere Smith. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tanya Moseley, and this is Fresh air This is Fresh air. I'm Tonia Moseley and my guest today is the actor, playwright and professor Anna DeVere Smith Over the last four decades, she invented and defined what's known as documentary or verbatim theater She's interviewed hundreds of people, then performed them on stage. fires in the mirror about the Crown Heights conflict made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist Twilight Los Angeles, nineteen ninety two about the city after to the Rotney King verdict earned her two Tony nominations She went on to write Let Me Down Easy about the body and the American healthcare system and notes from the field about the school to prison pipeline. This play is called Basil Bigs, and it's the story of her own great great grandfather, a free black man who played an important role in the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg This thing that you do, this verbatim theater, I have heard you describe it as you're borrowing people's stories with their permission. And there's something very specific about the people you choose. How do you decide who to interview Well, who to interview is just who could, you know, say My play Let Me Down Easy was about health carere, but it was also about the vulnerability of the human body to the state, to disease, And so I did extensive interviewing. I went to, for example, South Africa U during the AIDS crisis when Mbecki was an AIDS denialist. I went to Rwanda. ten years after the genocide, sort of broken societies and talk to people And I have an abstract idea of the problem that I'm trying to investigate. don't have a story And then in the process of doing the interviews and more importantly in the process of being in the rehearsal room, I find a through line of a story The inspiration come for Lete Down Easy Dr. Ralph Harowitz was the head of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. And he invited me in the late nineties T come to Yale Medical School and to interview doctors and patients and to perform at something called Medical Grand Rounds as a way of showing the doctors that they don't listen And I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And at first I thought it was because I was just too intimidated to be around all those doctors And he didn't give up. And when I finally went started doing the interviews of patients. I realized the reason I was reallyally worried was because I knew it would have something to do with death. And I did this performance at Medical Grand Rounds, and I performed doctors and some people who had been very, very sick And after that performance, maybe a year later, he asked me to come back and do it in another situation and I did. And those same patients, they were waiting eagerly backstage to say hello And I thought, now why would you want to come to see a show again dealing with a moment in your life where you almost die And it dawned on me because Dying or not Something about the performance made it all real in a good way. and solid in a good way because this is before the big health carere conversation onnce the health care conversation as we've started to approach Obama And the whole conversation of health carere starts to become real then I realize I have a real sort of political place to put this excursion really around death into a frame. and that's what made me continue to work on it. And also becausecause you know, people say Oh, how did you get this person to talk to you or How'd you get this person to trust you? Oh, no I'm looking for the people who are screaming from a mountaintop I just happen to be walking by. And when you go into a palliative care unit, you sit with somebody Wh's dying if they have the strength, It's a scream from the mountaintop. They want to be heard They want to communicate And that's very dramatic and very stageworthy. and let me down easy There's a person that you embody, Brent Williams. He's a rodeo bull rider from Idaho. You talk about him quite a bit over the last twenty years. He's was someone who really taught you what seems like a lot of lessons, play a little clip because he talked to you about the ways bull riding has wrecked his body that he has this one story that Bull shoved his face through metal chuts, for example. And in this clip pererformances Williams, you're talking about his health care deductible Yeah, I got insurance bllue cross of Idaho. Family policy, two hundred and sixty bucks a month cover all of us Then we got a seven thousand five hundred dollars deductible Which is stupid. I mean, you know we don't ever meet that I mean, all us paying money, then we gota pay seven thousand five hundred before they meet it They're just trying to rape us. likeike all the people that got the money, they rape the poor til pretty soon or they rape the middle class toill the middle class becomes poor. they're gonna start raping the rich And they're going they're going to break the whole country. I think But basically I'm an optimist I was my guest, Anna DeVere Smith as Brent Williams, Let Me Down Easy. And when you watch this, there is a lot of physicality to that performance. You're wearing a cowboy hat, your legs are wide, you're strutting across the stage. And these are parts of the story as well, that body language. What is it telling us? What is it telling you that words don't convey First of all, if my performance is attentive to detail thenen you see the choreography know why You're drawn to that person But if we were to sit down and break it down for you and show you the choreography, you'd know why. I mean, with Brent, he was kind of outrageous, you know, I actually invited Brent to New York a couple of times. and he's a very different person than the sort of artist that I hang out with very, very conservative. You know, he's a perfect example of someone whose game You know, who comes with goodwill He knows. and I have he was in my apartment dancing cheek to cheek with the astute Legal scholar, Patricia Williams Wow. And so it's about goodwill. You know, we talk about how do we get over these differences. It's like he doesn't agree with anybody in this case it's sitting around at dinner and then dancing afterwards and people are drank enough. You know agre Nobody agrees with agreed with Brent But he felt at home in my house, right You like talking to people that you don't agree with Well, not necessarily all the time, for the purpose of putting them in play, yes So you know, we have to admit that that's also different in a way from real life, right I can do things in my art that I may not be able to do in my life. So with Brent, I went to the National Rdeo Finals with him and standing around with all of his friends, you know, swiging shivis telling stories about women that weren't so great, right Would I be doing that just for fun? Probably not Today I'm talking with actor and playwright Anna DeVere Smith about her new play, Basil Bigs It's about her own great, great grandfather, a free black man who reburied thousands of Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground where Lincoln delivered his famous address We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air This is Fresh Air, and today I am talking with actor and playwright Anna DeVre Smith play, Basil Bigs, traces the life of her great great grandfather in the Civil War era Gettysburg It premis this month at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, written for the nation's two hundred fiftieth anniversary Smith's earlier plays include Fires in the Mirror, Twilight Los Angeles nineteen ninety two, and her twenty sixteen play Notes fromrom the Field I want to talk briefly about the choices you made in Notes from the field. You showcased a wide range of people, civil rights leaders and high school students Prisoners like Denise Dodson She was an inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women and she was serving time for murder. And I'm going to play a clip. Here she is talking about her children and the circumstances of her crime, you playing her. Let's listen I had Six children Now I have five One of them died since I've been here The oldest being thirty four, the youngest being twenty one. I had my youngest child when I was in a Baltimore detention center. I've been here twenty three years Well, My boyfriend, my former boyfriend because we wasn't together at the time shot and killed a guy who tried to rape me. Well, they didn't consider an accomplice. I got the same charg as he did First degree murder I think it's fair You talk about some nice life with us in in your control or not somebody's life has been taken. So I do think it's fair But I think that if I had had a better education, I would have been more upright, so to speak know because without that education, I always felt less than. And I think if I had had that education, I would have known that I am somebody. I am a good person H. That was my guest, Anna DeVere Smith as inmate Denise Sen I can almost hear your questions in her answers, andna of course, like the questions you ask to elicit those answers, but it's her demeanor. She was one of several black women and girls at the heart of this. notes from the field What drew you to put Pe like her at the center of the story Well, the story really was about looking at the pressures or what would we call what are the things that pull us away from giving people and education And why when they are unable? to fit into maybe the sorting mechanism of education Do they end up? incarcerated And I heard a chilling statistic that there's something like It's in the seventy percent of black and brown kids. that can't really read at the level they need to read just across the board in the United States. Yeah. And so we have to ask Deply Deply What's in the way of that. And Nes from the field was looking at education and the things that pull people away from school and the things that pull school away from people Um and Denise you know, of course, sitting in a A prison I mean, she's aware of being under surveillance all the time you know, she's probably about a year maybe from going for the Review board again She's very conscious of every single thing she's saying And there was extraordinary humility in Denise and emotional power and her job in prison. was to train service dogs And she talked about how Dogs are more decent than people Even that the amount of attention that she gives those dogs to train them. What if We gave the same type of attention to children And the last thing I'll say about this is even if you go back to Thomas Jefferson And you look at his plan in the notes from the state of Virginia in the state of Virginia His plan for education was to find the excellent ones and throw out the rubbish. The word rubbish is in that document. and that's just talking about white men. And so our system has always been one of Sorting Let's sort out the people that we don't want to be bothered with You ended up studying at the American Conservatory Theater theater community that you then became a part of U You know, the way we think about theater today is always talking about it in terms of keeping it alive. And this sounds like this was a vibrant place for you. First of all my first job was for a black theater company that had been started by Ed Bullen's great black playwright And it was called the Grassroots Theater Company And I went in there to see if there was something I could do. And they said, well, you could be the stage manager I said, I don't know how to do that. Oh, you'll be fine You look like you could be good Wh was their so called stage manager And I had a crisis when I decided to go to school at the American Conservatory Theater, which would be like the White People's Theaterre, you know in the middle of town That was very, you know, resourced and not to work anymore at the Grassros Theaterre company. But the American Conservatory Theater had a company of fifty two actors And that's where I was trained. So that was an entirely different type of time. than now And you know, we always say the theater is dying, but I think it's that it has another economic model now. Those were the days when the idea was to have a theater in your town U that was the sort of gem, the cultural gem of a town, like a symphony And that changed when those theaters started to see themselves as breeding places for Broadway And so I would say it's not that the theater is dead, it's that it had a different economic model And we never know when that may change again I mean, you're deep in Bil big story right now, but there is there an American story you have your sights on for the future that's been swirling in your head that you're dying to explore No, because I think that that Basil Biggs' story Um about approaching the civil warar about being a part of restoring his town after this massive, massive. catastrophe and following through touch the American prromise and going through The fifteenth Amendment which the play takes us through that I think there are many things about that that are still unfinished business in our country right now And so I'm pleased to be able to to see what lessons I can learn, the actors can learn, and the audience can learn by looking at that moment in history and looking at this particular family. and how they came through it Anna DeVere Smith, thank you so much for this conversation and your time This has been a real pleasure My pleasure Thank you so much to you and your producers act and playwright Anna Deveere Smith. Her new play, Basil Biggs, debuts at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia this weekend comoming up. TV critic David Bean Cley reviews Larry David's new HBO series This is fresh air HBO presents a new seven part sketch comedy series that's an irreverent look at American history, just in time for the country's two hundred fiftieth anniversary It's called Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, and it stars Larry David and comes from Higher ground, Barack and Michelle Obama's production compomany Our TV critic David Ban Cley has this review One of the first things the Obamas did for TV after forming their higher ground production company, builduild a series around a singular American voice. That voice was Stud's Turkle The Chicago writer, whose nineteen seventy four working class oral history working. was a major influence on the young Barack Obama. In twenty twenty three, Obama saluted and continued Turkele's vision by hosting and narrating, working, what we do all day very impressive, very serious four part Netflix documentary series Now, Higher Ground is building another series around a singular American voice The results are equally impressive but much less serious because this time The voice belongs to Larry David America's unofficial national Cmudgon He's turned being disgruntled into a massive fortune and into a lengthy, brilliant comedy career that includes Seinfeld, Kerber enthusiasm, And now life, Larry, and the pursuit of unhappiness This new series is created and written by Larry David and Jeff Schafer They're also executive producers, as are the Obamas Schaefer directs and is well tuned to Larry David's rhythms and sensibilities. Over the decades, Schaefer wrote dozens of episodes of Seinfeld and wrote and directed even more installments of Kerb Their new collaboration is much more heavily scripted than adlib and is expensively mounted Costumes, sets, even action sequences all look first rate But even when Larry David is part of a silent tableau recreating the Continental Congress wearing a powdered wig while Barack Obama opens the show as the host Larry can't stay silent for long. truly makes America unique is the fact that We've always been a work in progress. We're not perfect We can be irassble Slfish sheep And let's face it, some of us will always find something to complain about. But as Americans, we have always found a way to overcome these naysayers, these deeply unpleasant people who stood in the way of progress. theseese miserable, intolerable, Did I mention Petty Hey, none of that's in the script. Life Larry in the pursuit of Unhappiness is subtitled An Almost History of America and provides just that Each sketch, introduced by narrator Samuel L. Jackson, starts with historical fact, then veers wildly and enjoyably off the rails. In every sketch, the guest stars get the vibe David is after and add to it effortlessly The opening sketch imagines that founding father Robert Livingston, played by Larry David suggested some rather unusual rules for the Declaration of Independence, beforefore Thomas Jefferson took over the job of writing it Henry Winkler plays John Hancock and Chris Parnell plays Benjamin Franklin who's reading some of Livingston's outrageous ideas to the assembled Congress. Here's another gem. No sharing desserts. If you want a dessert, order it, none of this pass it around We're not animals, mister Franklin, all eating out of a trough. We can all have our own forks. Th we'll all take bites, putut the forks in our mouths, put it back in the pie after it's been in our mouths, mister Franklin. It's unsanitary. Sometimes I don't want a whole slice of pie. I just want to taste a pie. Get your own damn piece of pie, Franklin If The next sketch jumps forward a full century from seventeen seventy six to eighteen seventy six and has Larry David, as Alexander Graham Bell, unveiling his newest invention, the telephone. to a small invited group of guests The guests though to offer suggestions of their own My assistant Watson is in another building out of sight and sound But with this device I will be able to communicate with him as if he was standing right next to me I will pick up the phone on my side and it will ring on his. What kind of ring Normal ring, it's just a ring It's a ring tyypical ring Maybe there could be a menu of rings that people could choose from. Oh yes, I would like mine to sound like a doorbell. I'd like mine to sound like a clown horn. Or perhaps a bicycle ring, you know. all wonderful ideas, but hardly the point. The point is I'll be able to communicate with someone who is miles away. What if I'm at a piano recital say and I don't want it to ring, so it just vibrates a Like a Jew's harp in your pocket. Oh Oh, that's just a fascinating idea. Oh what if you could send show? What if you invent your own? Go off and invent your own. That's not this. You want something that vibrates? Go! G invent it. This is all nonsense. Yes, it is all nonsense Even with some punchlines that are sharp and pointed It's also whimsical, it's wonderful. Other sketches in the first show include trench warfare during World War I and Rosa Parks on a Birmingham bus ride predating her famous bus boycut HBO wants a lot of the sketch details kept secret, and I'm fine with that But every sequence brings its own unexpected joys. Isn't that Richard kind and Michael Chicklas And Sean Hayays, Katherine Han, Bill Hadater and John Ham And Jerry Seinfeld from Seinfeld And Jeff Garland, Suzie Esman and JB Smooth from Kerb all joining in. Yes, it is And there are others aboard too, as unpublicized special surprises. Thecoming sketches are based on everything from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Army McCarthy hearings and the Moon Landings. equally hilarious I've seen enough to say that Larry David isn't just having great fun with history. He's adding to his own with yet another high concept comedy series Home Run David Be and Cooly reviewed Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness The series premieres on HBO toomorrow If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis about the rise of masculinism. or with actor and activist Laverne Cox on her new memoir about her life career and the attack on transgender rights Check out our podcast. You'll find lots of fresh air interviews And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations on what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whYY d. org slash fresh air Thisare'secy producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shherock, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krinzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challiner, Susan Nakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nko Gonzalees Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper Tereresa Madden, directed todayod's showow with Terry Gross. I'm Tona Moseley