Smart People

“…funny, observant and biting.” —Denver Post

“The playwright puts this incendiary topic in a realistic context, and addresses it in a refreshingly honest manner.” —Variety

“…puts race under a comic microscope.” —Washington Post

A Provocative and Humorous Exposé on the Nature of Prejudice.

Four intelligent, attractive and opinionated Harvard-associated professionals search for love, success and identity while attempting to navigate the intricacies of racial and sexual politics in this whip-smart new play.

Through bright, funny dialogue and fast-paced vignettes, playwright Lydia Diamond brings her quartet of complicated characters to vibrant life.

Jackson, a young African-American surgical resident, who struggles to get along with his superiors, tires himself out running a clinic for uninsured patients.

Ginny, an academic psychologist of Japanese-Chinese heritage, at the extreme end of self-assuredness, studies Asian-American women’s reactions to stress.

Brian, a properly smart and smug White neuroscientist is running into career roadblocks researching the brain’s responses to race and its societal implications.

Valerie, an African-American actor, pays her rent by cleaning houses and working as Brian’s research assistant.

Challenge your assumptions. Step outside your comfort zone. See things from a different perspective. Schedule time to see this play, right away!

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Smart People Playwright Lydia R. Diamond has won numerous national awards for her craft, including the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, a fitting honor, as Ms. Hansberry was one of Diamond’s favorite and most influential writers. A Raisin in the Sun changed Diamond’s life.

Diamond grew up as a reader in an artistic home and went to Northwestern University to study acting but shifted her focus to playwriting while there. She began producing her own plays and formed a theatre company in Chicago, where her first play, Solitaire, received awards and acclaim.

After relocating to Boston with her husband, who had gotten a teaching post at Harvard, The Huntington Theatre chose Diamond for the Playwriting Fellows program in 2006. The Boston theatre company, Company One, then produced her adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel , “The Bluest Eye,” in 2007 and her play, Voyeurs de Venus, in 2008. Alicia Keys produced her well-known play, Stick Fly, which premiered on Broadway in 2011.

Writing Smart People took Diamond eight years. Three years into it, Obama won the presidential election, changing how Americans talk and think about race. Diamond had to look at those things with an open mind and raise the play’s stakes, which changed everything about what the play had originally wanted to be.

In 2014 Smart People premiered in Boston at the Huntington Theatre Company. Since then, it has played at Second Stage in NYC, Arena Stage in Washington D.C. and Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, Il.

Diamond is clear that she is “communicating with an American audience and that we come to the table with all of our hang-ups about race, sexuality and class. I want my writing to always be entertaining and not didactic.”

Diamond’s work has been performed at companies including American Conservatory Theatre Company, Steppenwolf Theatre Co., The Alliance Theatre, The Guthrie Theater and Roundabout Theatre Co. (off-Broadway), to name but a few. Her resume is full of honorary degrees from esteemed schools, dozens of writing awards and teaching credentials. Recently, she has also written for Showtime, NBC, HBO, HBOMAX and Hulu.

Featured Cast

“It is important that the play feel like an invitation to all of us to own the conversation. We can laugh and not feel uncomfortable because we know that we are all equally uncomfortable; it is why we go to the theatre — to laugh, and squirm, and be challenged and affirmed.”—Playwright, Lydia R. Diamond

Playwright Lydia R. Diamond set this four-person play in 2008, putting the illusion of a post-racial America under a microscope through the eyes of her exceptionally smart characters, all associated with Harvard University. The result is a work fueled with provocative tension and dynamic comedy. Each scene is bold and fearless in the way it talks about race, but is also funny and quirky with very human characters. It is more an exploration of relationships than of social science.

The play begins with each character revealing their stories in an isolated vignette, talking to their students, their supervisors, directors and colleagues. Then, they begin to interact. As their relationships evolve, the four discover that their motivations and interpretations are not as clear as their superior knowledge would have them believe. 

Brian White is a Harvard professor of neuroscience. His recent study has found that a negative response to racial differences is hardwired into the human brain.

Jackson Moore, Brian’s quick-tempered best friend, is a surgical intern who struggles with white supervisors disparaging his decisions. He also runs a clinic for low-income people in Chinatown.

Actor, Valerie Johnson, meets discrimination and type-casting in her theatrical career. She encounters Jackson in the emergency room. The chemistry between them sizzles, but sparks fly when the two Black characters clash because of ingrained attitudes of classism, racism and sexism.

Ginny Yang is a prickly psychology professor with a shopping habit who is studying patterns of self-limiting behavior in Asian American women. She meets Brian while on a Harvard panel for “minority matriculation, retention and recruitment,” and the two enter into an edgy relationship.

In Smart People, Diamond shows that no matter how well we think we understand the influence of race on human interaction, it still gets in the way of genuine communication and connection.

However uncomfortable, we need to keep trying.