Jimmy Smits Returns to Brooklyn College to Impart Life Lessons to Student Actors

On a chilly Monday night in December, Brooklyn College alumnus Jimmy Smits, currently starring in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna in the Tropics, came back to the very theater in the basement of Whitman Hall where it all started.

Accompanied by Professor Sam Leiter, chairperson of the Department of Theater, the actor was relaxed and glad to be back. "It hasn't changed very much," observed the forty-eight-year-old Brooklyn native, looking around the 120-seat New Workshop Theater where he starred in many of his earliest productions. "This is where I remember taking a lot of leaps," he recalled, counting off a number of Brooklyn College shows he appeared in from 1976 to 1980, including a performance of classic Japanese Kabuki directed by Professor Leiter.

"And before that, when I was going to Thomas Jefferson High School, my drama coach used to take me here to see plays. I was just sixteen, and I remember coming to the College—some of the first shows I ever saw were in this theater."

While thirty aspiring actors from the B.F.A. and M.F.A. acting programs peppered Smits with practical questions about Los Angeles, agents, role selection, and how to read scripts, Smits returned again and again to his theme of how getting an education and gaining experience on stage is important to an actor. "I always tried to do as much work as possible, be as versatile as possible, and even do shows where I was going to fall flat on my face," Smits said. "I never regretted going the route that I did, continuing my education at Cornell University, even when I had friends who had already gone to Hollywood and were appearing as 'drug dealer of the week' on Hill Street Blues."

In the 1980s, Smits landed his first role as Don Johnson's partner on the premier episode of Miami Vice, but his character was killed off twenty minutes into the show. In 1986 he landed his break playing hot-shot attorney Victor Sifuentes on L.A. Law, a role that earned Smits the Emmy Award for best actor in 1990. After leaving the show, Smits worked in a few movies and returned to the stage for more training. "That's how you keep your acting chops. The only way to do that is to experience a living, breathing audience—no editors picking your best takes, just you and that audience out there.

"I heard another actor talking about why he didn't like doing theater, because he couldn't stand to do the exact same thing over and over every night. And I thought, 'that's what I love about it!' Because you are constantly refining your performance, discovering a new move or a new way of gazing at another person, and then hearing the audience recognize it. And you can't get that feeling anywhere else. You're aware of this energy that is coming at you from a living, breathing audience."

In 1994, he was on location with Halle Berry filming Solomon and Sheba when he got a call from producer Steven Bochco, the creator of L.A. Law, who was having trouble with the star of his new series, NYPD Blue ("You'll notice that all of my TV work has to do with cities," he joked). After five seasons on the top-rated show, Smits left, partly because he didn't like getting script changes at the very last minute and the general chaotic atmosphere on the show. "Every time they made a change in the script and sent it down to the set it was for the better, but I didn't like working that way."

Smits explained how an actor works to develop a process to find the character in a script and talked at length about the work he has put into his character in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, a play about Cuban workers in a Florida cigar factory and the events that transpire when they listen to a hired lecturer (Smits) read from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina while they roll cigars. The play, which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2003, made its Broadway debut in November. "I do a lot of research," he explained. "For this role, I read the part, and knew that I could bring more to the role than was on the page. I wanted to get to the mythic parts of the character. I went to Tampa, Florida, where the play takes place, and did research in the local libraries to find out what people wore, and how they spoke and acted in 1929, which is when the play is set. Then, the next part is in rehearsal, where you need to gain the trust of the people you act with. That's very important. You can call it 'chemistry' between actors when you see it, but that only happens when there is trust."

After his presentation, Smits watched Brooklyn College students as they performed short scenes, and then critiqued their performances. Smits enjoyed his return to the New Workshop Theater but expressed regret at how focused and driven he was while a student at Brooklyn College, where he juggled his studies with the pressures of being a new father. "I should have had more fun. I should have enjoyed my education more," he said. "But I was lucky in the amount and variety of roles I got to play here. And there has always been a teacher or a professor along my way who has become a great influence on me."