Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education 2016

One of the most hailed and provocative theatre artists of our time, Anna Deavere Smith, leads a new installation of powerful first-person storytelling inNOTES FROM THE FIELD: DOING TIME IN EDUCATION. Urgent and inspiring, it depicts the personal accounts of students, parents, teachers and administrators caught in America's school-to-prison pipeline, as they experience in their wider communities the inequities of poverty, lack of opportunity, and over-aggressive policing. Investigating a justice system that pushes minors from poor communities out of the classroom and into incarceration, NOTES FROM THE FIELD: DOING TIME IN EDUCATION shines a light on a lost generation of American youth. Drawn from interviews with more than 250 people living and working within a challenged system, Anna Deavere Smith continues her mastery of the documentary solo performance by stimulating awareness and ultimately, change for the better.

NOTES FROM THE FIELD is a co-production with Boston's American Repertory Theatre, where it will be performed August 20 - September 17. An earlier version of the work was developed and performed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre under the direction of Leah C. Gardner in the summer of 2015.

NOTES FROM THE FIELD is the first in Second Stage Theatre's 2016-17 mainstage season, which includes Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Tracy Letts' MAN FROM NEBRASKA, directed by David Cromer, and Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Bruce Norris' A PARALLELOGRAM, directed by Michael Greif. A fourth mainstage production remains to be announced.