S.O.S.
‘Emergency’ needs help
By Don Shirley
The usual unfair rap on L.A. theater is that it’s a festival of showcases for people who want to be screen stars. In fact, most productions are not mounted for that goal. But sometimes a “show” screams to have “case” attached to it. That’s the case with Daniel Beaty’s solo show, Emergency, staged by Charles Randolph-Wright at the Geffen Playhouse.
I don’t know Beaty’s ambitions, although his L.A. Times interview included a passing reference to a same-day audition for a TV pilot. But Emergency has the hallmarks of an extended audition piece. In front of Westside theatergoers who might be industry power brokers, Beaty plays characters who are young, middle-aged, old, male, female, straight, gay, Ghanaian, Jamaican – as if he’s trying to make sure that if you don’t have a role for him in one particular guise, maybe these others will make the sale.
It’s fortunate that Beaty’s show was first noticed in New York. If it had traveled from the West to the East instead of vice-versa, it surely would have come with the kind of “showcase” baggage that might have made it less likely to have won its Obie Award.
That Obie was for both writing and performing. The latter makes sense – Beaty is a remarkably convincing chameleon – but the writing is awfully shallow. Beaty has a gripping central image – the hulk of a slave ship suddenly emerges from the Hudson River, just off the island occupied by the Statue of Liberty. But he doesn’t know what to do with it.
Because this is a solo show(-off), Beaty chose to play 43 characters in 80 minutes – all of them reacting to this startling development. If his priority had been the depth of his narrative, he might have written himself a mere 10 or 12 roles. It still could have made a great showcase, as well as a stronger play.
One of his characters is a former Shakespearean scholar, now mentally ill, who swims out to the boat. He should be the protagonist. A widower whose wife was killed by a young black thug, he has rigorously repressed his own African American heritage in order to make sure his sons move beyond any semblance of slave mentality. Apparently the repression has gone on long enough – I use “apparently” because we don’t even hear what happened within this man’s head on the day of the “emergence,” before he took the plunge. We don’t catch up with him until he’s already onboard the ship, communing in half-baked platitudes with the ghost of the chief of the drowned slaves.
Instead, Beaty focuses more attention on the professor’s two sons, especially one who’s a contestant in a reality TV show for slam poets. Although he leaves the competition in order to deal with his father, he returns in time to convert the experience into a competitive advantage. The TV show format also enables Beaty to present the poems of three other contestants and impersonate the female emcee.
The professor’s other son is effeminate and gay, with a variety of picturesque acquaintances for Beaty to introduce, even as he’s barely glancing at the narrative’s central spine. And then there are the two 12-year-old kids who still haven’t been taught about slavery in school (really? 30 years after Roots galvanized TV-land?) and assorted other commentators.
Emergency would have been a perfect opportunity to dramatize moments from the story of New York-specific slavery, but instead Beaty prefers to emphasize the usual points about slavery in general – points that were dramatized more eloquently by such writers as August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks. The ship itself and most of the slaves who were on it receive so little attention from the playwright that they barely seem to have emerged.
Emergency, Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. (310) 208-5454. geffenplayhouse.com. Closes May 25.
For more reviews by Don Shirley, see Stage listings.
Published: 04/30/2008
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