Anna Deavere Smith’s latest production Let Me Down Easy airs on witf on January 13 at 9 p.m. Originally presented at Long Wharf Theatre, the play received its New York premiere at Second Stage Theatre. The Great Performances production was recorded in February 2011 in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater in Washington, DC, launching a national tour that concluded in September.

Having been credited with creating a new form of theater, to create Let Me Down Easy Smith interviewed an eclectic group of people (300 on three continents) and performs several in an evening that is funny, moving and engaging.

The title resonates on several levels reverberating with meanings of lost love, the faith that sustains people in times of difficulty, and ultimately, the end of life.

Smith, through her chameleon-like virtuosity, creates an indelible gallery of portraits, from a rodeo bull rider to a prize fighter to a New Orleans doctor during Hurricane Katrina, as well as boldface names like former Texas Governor Ann Richards, legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong, network film critic Joel Siegel, and supermodel Lauren Hutton. She performs 19 characters in the course of an hour and thirty five minutes. Their stories are alternately humorous and heart-wrenching, and often a blend of both. Building upon each other with hypnotic force, her subjects recount personal encounters with the frailty of the human body, ranging from a mere brush with mortality, coping with an uncertain future in today’s medical establishment, to confronting an end of life transition. The testimony of health care professionals adds further texture to a vivid portrayal of the cultural and societal attitudes to matters of health.

With keen observation and understated compassion, Smith – without judgment and maintaining the dignity of her subjects at all times — effortlessly submerges her own persona, and assumes her characters’ vocal and physical mannerisms with unerring accuracy.

Despite the profound poignancy of the issues at hand, Smith leavens the evening with many lighter anecdotes, some outright hilarious: choreographer Elizabeth Streb recounts how she accidentally set herself on fire as part of an elaborate birthday celebration; Smith’s own Aunt (Lorraine Colman) recalls the last (and distinctly unsentimental) words uttered by her elder sister; and when a Yale School of Medicine oncology fellow informs cancer patient Ruth Katz that the hospital has lost her records — he is dumbfounded to discover she is actually the associate dean of the medical school there. Other characters address the intensity of the will to live even in the face of dire sickness: University of Notre Dame musicologist Susan Youens rhapsodizes on the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, one of over a thousand works Schubert composed before his untimely death at age 31; and while undergoing chemotherapy, Ann Richards defiantly tells of learning how to hang up the phone to preserve her precious “Chi.”

Called “the most exciting individual in American theater” by Newsweek magazine, Smith (Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles) turns on this occasion to tell a powerful story which points to the financial and psychological cost of care, the preciousness of life and the inevitability of our mortality.

“Even in the darkest hour, even where the crisis is the greatest, you’ll often find people who have the gift of grace, the gift of kindness, the gift of healing,” Smith observed. “Ultimately, through this play I am trying to spark a conversation that is easier, and maybe more enjoyable to have through art and entertainment than through politics.”

Let Me Down Easy was inspired by work she did at Yale School of Medicine, where she was invited as a visiting professor. Bill Moyers dedicated a full hour segment to profiling Ms. Smith and Let Me Down Easy, noting with amazement how her play transformed “a houseful of strangers” into “an intimate community.”

Throughout the evening, Smith assumes the parts of (in order):

• James H. Cone, author, reverend, and professor, Union Theological Seminary, NYC
• Elizabeth Streb, choreographer, Streb Dance Company, NYC
• Brent Williams, rodeo bull rider, Idaho
• Lance Armstrong, Tour de France Victor
• Sally Jenkins, sports columnist, The Washington Post
• Michael Bentt, world champion heavyweight boxer
• Hazel Merritt, patient, Yale-New Haven Hospital
• Lauren Hutton, supermodel
• Ruth Katz, patient, Yale-New Haven Hospital
• Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, physician, Charity Hospital, New Orleans
• Dr. Phillip A. Pizzo, dean, Stanford University School of Medicine
• Susan Youens, Musicologist, University of Notre Dame
• Eduardo Bruera, palliative care M.D., Anderson Cancer Center
• Ann Richards, former governor, Texas
• Lorraine Coleman, retired teacher, Anna Deavere Smith’s aunt
• Joel Siegel, ABC movie critic
• Peter Gomes, reverend, Memorial Church, Howard University
• Trudy Howell, director, Chance Orphanage, Johannesburg
• Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk, author, French translator for the Dalai Lama