Daniel Beaty's Rousing Call
- By News Hound
- Published 07/11/2007
- Theatre
- Unrated
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View all articles by News HoundDaniel Beaty's Rousing Call
'Emergence-See!' Actor Knows Firsthand the Struggles Facing Black America
By Jane Horwitz
In his 20s, poet-actor-singer-motivational speaker Daniel Beaty was a "teaching artist" in New York City schools. The problems he saw among inner-city kids provided "the clarity of the story I wanted to tell" about African American life, he recalls.
In his solo piece "Emergence-See!," at Arena Stage through July 22, a phantom slave ship docks in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. The surreal event forces the 43 African American characters he plays to reconnect with history and rethink their present and future.
Beaty, now 31, means his play to be a wake-up call. "There is a cycle that if we don't break [it] has ramifications for all of America. . . . Because when black America heals, all of America heals," he says.
After the civil rights movement peaked, "the concept of collective progress became less of a priority and . . . there was an intergenerational breakdown in communication," Beaty says. One casualty was a forgetting of history. "To not give an accurate historical context for the current conditions facing African Americans is to suggest that African Americans are inherently less," he says. It is crucial, he adds, "how our young people perceive themselves."
The actor describes his own childhood in Dayton, Ohio, in a family with "tremendous dysfunction." He recalls an absentee father, heroin-addicted and often in prison, and a crack-addicted brother. With his mother working constantly to keep the family afloat, Beaty often was alone and would perform the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he idolized, in front of a mirror. A third-grade teacher noticed his gifts, he says, and got him speaking engagements at civic organizations. A scholarship to a private high school followed, then Yale and graduate school at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Beaty studied opera while at Yale and sang in Europe in the summers. "Arts have saved my life," he says, along with the example of his mother's work ethic.
Actress Ruby Dee saw Beaty performed "Emergence-See!" in 2003 at the Urban Theatre Arts Festival in New York and became a champion of Beaty's. "He could be a rapper, he could be an opera star," she says. "I was absolutely fascinated with him as a performer and with the material . . . touching on issues, black identity, for example, children with HIV, the epidemic of missing fathers, that kind of thing." Beaty did the piece at the prestigious Public Theater in 2006 and now performs it internationally. Dee applauds him for "trying to make the facts of life and history mesh. . . . There's a serious mind here, trying to make sense out of things."
Asked whether he considers himself primarily a poet, actor, singer or speaker, Beaty answers, "I just usually say that I'm an artist. I'm clear about what my purpose is, which is to transform pain into power and to underscore our interconnectedness, our need for each other to heal." His tools, Beaty adds, can be "poetry, music, plays, screenplays . . . by any means necessary, in the most joyous sense of the word. I am having the most extraordinary career."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071001952.html
By Jane Horwitz
In his 20s, poet-actor-singer-motivational speaker Daniel Beaty was a "teaching artist" in New York City schools. The problems he saw among inner-city kids provided "the clarity of the story I wanted to tell" about African American life, he recalls.
In his solo piece "Emergence-See!," at Arena Stage through July 22, a phantom slave ship docks in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. The surreal event forces the 43 African American characters he plays to reconnect with history and rethink their present and future.
Beaty, now 31, means his play to be a wake-up call. "There is a cycle that if we don't break [it] has ramifications for all of America. . . . Because when black America heals, all of America heals," he says.
After the civil rights movement peaked, "the concept of collective progress became less of a priority and . . . there was an intergenerational breakdown in communication," Beaty says. One casualty was a forgetting of history. "To not give an accurate historical context for the current conditions facing African Americans is to suggest that African Americans are inherently less," he says. It is crucial, he adds, "how our young people perceive themselves."
The actor describes his own childhood in Dayton, Ohio, in a family with "tremendous dysfunction." He recalls an absentee father, heroin-addicted and often in prison, and a crack-addicted brother. With his mother working constantly to keep the family afloat, Beaty often was alone and would perform the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he idolized, in front of a mirror. A third-grade teacher noticed his gifts, he says, and got him speaking engagements at civic organizations. A scholarship to a private high school followed, then Yale and graduate school at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Beaty studied opera while at Yale and sang in Europe in the summers. "Arts have saved my life," he says, along with the example of his mother's work ethic.
Actress Ruby Dee saw Beaty performed "Emergence-See!" in 2003 at the Urban Theatre Arts Festival in New York and became a champion of Beaty's. "He could be a rapper, he could be an opera star," she says. "I was absolutely fascinated with him as a performer and with the material . . . touching on issues, black identity, for example, children with HIV, the epidemic of missing fathers, that kind of thing." Beaty did the piece at the prestigious Public Theater in 2006 and now performs it internationally. Dee applauds him for "trying to make the facts of life and history mesh. . . . There's a serious mind here, trying to make sense out of things."
Asked whether he considers himself primarily a poet, actor, singer or speaker, Beaty answers, "I just usually say that I'm an artist. I'm clear about what my purpose is, which is to transform pain into power and to underscore our interconnectedness, our need for each other to heal." His tools, Beaty adds, can be "poetry, music, plays, screenplays . . . by any means necessary, in the most joyous sense of the word. I am having the most extraordinary career."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071001952.html
