History pays a mind-blowing visit in Daniel Beaty's heartfelt and generally winning solo show "Emergency," which opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse. In the waters of New York Harbor, a stone's throw from the ever-fabulous Lady Liberty, a 400-year-old slave ship surfaces to the amazement of a growing throng of African Americans.
Though we never actually see the physical vessel onstage, the crowds of sightseers and tourist merchants hawking "slave ship buttons" assure us that this is no floating phantom. Beyond rational explanation, the invisible past has materialized, allowing all who are haunted by its long shadow to grapple with a more concrete manifestation of its reality.
Naturally, the reactions are all over the map. Beaty, mutating into characters with the ease of someone flicking a theatrical remote control, lends his elastic voice and mannerisms to the ensuing din.
One well-off black corporate type bemoans the ship's anachronistic appearance: "It's appalling! It's a setback. In 2008 there are black people succeeding in every field -- tennis, golf, we even run for president. This is the last thing we need."
On the other side of the ideological divide, a female scholar, who has written a book on "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome," hopes that the difficult subject of black resentment will no longer be taboo. "This is exactly why most of us never watch those PBS specials or talk about slavery with our children," she says. "We don't know what to do with the anger."
At the center of the story is Rodney, a young man who's made it to the grand finale of "America's Next Top Poet." The program, hosted by Sharita (a Tyra Banks type viewed on fast-forward), provides a forum for spoken-word artists that's apparently watched by millions. Admittedly, this proposition is somewhat harder to buy than an antiquated slave ship circling Manhattan, but it allows Beaty, who appeared on HBO's "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry" for two seasons, to strut his impassioned lyrical stuff as he portrays contestants reckoning with the paradoxes and possibilities of being young, gifted and black.
The news that Rodney's father, a Shakespeare scholar whose mental health was rocked after the murder of his wife, has jumped atop the slave ship and is in communion with the spirit of an ancient African chief, has threatened his son's big TV break.
