{"id":226709,"date":"2026-06-24T10:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T10:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/226709\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T10:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T10:33:07","slug":"anna-deavere-smith-premieres-a-new-play-in-philadelphia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/226709\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Deavere Smith premieres a new play in Philadelphia"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith will premiere her newest stage work, \u201cThe Basil Biggs Project,\u201d<\/a> at Philadelphia\u2019s Wilma Theater June 26-28 as part of ArtPhilly\u2019s festival \u201cWhat Now: 2026.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

The play is centered on Smith\u2019s ancestor Basil Biggs, who was hired in 1863 to bury thousands of dead soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg and to prepare the grounds for President Abraham Lincoln\u2019s visit when he delivered his most famous address<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

According to newspaper accounts of the time, Biggs was hired to put together a crew of seven to 10 Black men to disinter bodies from their hastily prepared shallow graves, search the corpses for any identifying effects and then rebury the soldiers in an orderly cemetery layout, which later became the Gettysburg National Cemetery.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were 7,000 dead bodies,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThe Confederates had moved into their house, turned their house into a hospital. Everything was destroyed. I think, because I don\u2019t have any letters or diaries, that the reason he took a rather grueling job is because he\u2019d lost everything.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Until recently, Smith had never heard of her ancestor, despite having had aunts, uncles and cousins named Biggs. In 2014, she appeared on the PBS television show \u201cFinding Your Roots\u201d<\/a> with host Henry Louis Gates Jr., who introduced Biggs as part of Smith\u2019s comprehensive genealogical presentation.\n<\/p>\n

Sitting across from Gates, Smith\u2019s first reaction to the revelation was, \u201cThat\u2019s a play.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

In addition to Smith\u2019s high-profile acting career in shows like \u201cThe West Wing\u201d and \u201cNurse Jackie,\u201d she is also known for writing documentary-style plays for which she records interviews with many people related to a particular topic and assembles verbatim excerpts into a script.\n<\/p>\n

Plays like \u201cFires in the Mirror\u201d (1992) and \u201cTwilight: Los Angeles\u201d (1994), about riots in Crown Heights, New York and Los Angeles, respectively, helped Smith win a MacArthur fellowship, often referred to as the \u201cgenius grant.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Smith said the discovery that she was related to someone who was part of a pivotal moment in American nation-building made Biggs\u2019 story urgent.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I\u2019ve chosen to deal in contemporary life with moments of controversy and catastrophe \u2014 race riots, kids going to jail \u2026 I\u2019m sort of on the fringe,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I remember what went through my head was: This is right in the center of American history. And that\u2019s a play. I know how to write it because it\u2019s at the very center of some of our values.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Unlike in Smith\u2019s previous plays, where extensive research allowed her to precisely depict her interview subjects down to their vocal tics and bodily gestures, very little is known about Basil Biggs, who never learned to write and left behind no personal accounts of his life.
\n\"BasilBasil Biggs is pictured with his wife Mary Jackson Biggs. (Courtesy of ArtPhilly)\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,1483],"class_list":["post-226709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}