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

For more than 50 years, Anna Deavere Smith has pioneered a type of theater built from real people's words, interviewing hundreds of Americans and then performing their words verbatim. Now she's telling a story from her own family with ‘Basil Biggs.’ It’s about her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man, who reburied the Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground for Lincoln's most famous speech. Smith …

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