Through powerful monologues, Anna Deavere Smith has tackled race riots, integration and health care. In Notes from the Field, she's using her characters to explore the school-to-prison pipeline.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is finishing a run on her latest work, "Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1,2 & 3)" at The Public Theater in New York.
A huge hit upon its release, the 1949 musical South Pacific still resonates with contributors to The Race Card Project — particularly a song about how prejudice is learned, not innate.
In her new memoir The Legs Are The Last To Go, actress Diahann Carroll talks about her glamorous career and lifestyle — and simplifying. But she says, "Stepping away from glamour is not an easy thing to do."
She's been acting for nearly 40 years; now she's taking a stab at directing, producing and writing. And she's doing all that — as well as acting — in one film: Then She Found Me. She tells NPR why.
For comedienne Joan Rivers, almost everything is fair game: race, sex, death and, of course, her life. That's the subject on her new autobiographical play, Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress.
Josh Brolin, who plays laconic Llewelyn Moss in the much-praised new Coen Brothers thriller No Country for Old Men, talks about his appetite for surprising characters and working with the filmmaking brothers.
Although he was known principally as a political adviser and campaign strategist, Karl Rove has been a critical part of the White House policy operation as well. The adviser's departure could have wide repercussions.