Reading List · Lisanne Swart
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Smith invented a documentary theatre method entirely her own — conducting hundreds of interviews around a moment of social crisis, then performing the subjects’ own words verbatim, embodying dozens of real people in a single show. This list is for readers and theatregoers who want more of that tradition: playwrights working in verbatim and documentary theatre, and journalists whose method of letting real voices carry the story shares her underlying conviction that ordinary testimony is more honest than official narrative.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 authors · Documentary Theatre · Verbatim Journalism · Updated August 2026
Studs Terkel
Terkel spent decades recording ordinary Americans talking about their work and lives, then assembling those voices into books like Working with almost no editorial intrusion — the same commitment to unfiltered testimony that drives Smith’s theatre, just on the page instead of the stage.
Where Smith performs other people’s words herself, Terkel disappears entirely and lets the tape speak — read him to see the same conviction that real testimony beats official narrative, worked through a different medium.
Moisés Kaufman
Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project developed ‘moment work,’ a verbatim theatre technique used in The Laramie Project, built from hundreds of interviews conducted after the murder of Matthew Shepard, structurally close to Smith’s own interview-based method.
The clearest contemporary peer working in the same documentary theatre tradition — The Laramie Project and Twilight: Los Angeles are often taught and discussed together.
Svetlana Alexievich
Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work built almost entirely from interviews with ordinary Soviet and post-Soviet citizens — about war, Chernobyl, the collapse of the USSR — assembled into what she calls a ‘novel of voices.’
The international, Nobel-recognized version of Smith’s core method: testimony assembled without a conventional narrator, treated as literature in its own right.
Katherine Boo
Boo spent over three years embedded in a Mumbai slum for Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and like Smith, deliberately kept herself out of the text, letting her subjects’ documented words and actions carry the entire story.
A different medium — narrative nonfiction rather than theatre — but the same underlying discipline: extensive interviewing and observation, with the author’s own voice minimized rather than centered.
Eve Ensler (V)
Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was built from over 200 interviews with women about their bodies and experiences, structured as a series of monologues performed by the writer herself — a similar interview-to-performance pipeline to Smith’s method, applied to a different subject.
Useful for readers interested in how interview-based theatre can center a single issue rather than a specific event, the way Smith’s plays typically do.
Ryszard Kapuściński
Kapuściński’s The Emperor is built almost entirely from the testimony of former palace servants describing a collapsing regime, narrated in their own voices with minimal authorial intrusion — a print journalism cousin to Smith’s theatrical method.
Read him for a print equivalent of what Smith does on stage: letting a chorus of real voices, rather than a single narrator, build the full picture of a moment.
Where to start if you loved Anna Deavere Smith
If you want the print equivalent, then read Studs Terkel.
The same commitment to unfiltered testimony, assembled on the page instead of the stage.
If you want a contemporary theatrical peer, then read Moisés Kaufman.
The Laramie Project uses a nearly identical verbatim interview method.
If you want the international, Nobel-level version, then read Svetlana Alexievich.
Her ‘novel of voices’ method shares Smith’s core conviction about testimony.
If you want her own work first, then start with her plays and books.
My complete guide to Anna Deavere Smith’s own work is the place to begin.
If you want more of this tradition, then keep exploring it.
My best plays and theatre books list has the natural successors.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Anna Deavere Smith
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