Arena Stage is presenting "Resurrection," an intense piece of theater by contemporary playwright Daniel Beaty which features the stories of six African-American males between the ages of 10 and 60.
The last time Arena Stage presented a piece by this playwright it was Beaty himself, alone on the stage. That was the hip-hop tinged solo show "Emergence-SEE!" which was built on the intriguing concept of the reaction of contemporary New Yorkers if they awoke one morning to see a seventeenth-century slave ship pulling into the harbor.
This time out, Beaty doesn’t take the stage during the ninety-minute, one-act play, but his words and his mind dominate the stage just the same. Now, however, the words come from the mouths of six talented actors who, under director Oz Scott’s elegant staging, deliver the humor, the passion, the pain and the hope that combine to make Beaty’s point.
The play is the result of Beaty’s reaction to the 2007 annual report of the National Urban League on "The State of Black America." The report was titled "The Portrait of a Black Male" and it gave statistical verification to some commonly acknowledged problems saying "because of its devastating and far-reaching ramifications, (the) underperformance of the black male is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today."
Beaty says he wasn’t interested in exploring stereotypes and it is clear from the play he has created that he’s much more interested in, as he says, "examining possibilities." It is the possibility of "resurrection" that is the unifying factor for five of the six black men in Beaty’s play. The sixth is a ten year old who is the promise of the future for all of them.
The five adult black men are spread over the life span from ages 20 to 60 with one at each decade mark. There’s the 20-year-old college graduate, the 30-year-old former convict trying to re-enter society, the 40-year-old business executive who keeps his sexual preference a secret, the 50-year-old proprietor of a health food store who is also the father of the 10 year old and, finally, the 60-year-old bishop of a black church who admits to an addiction to food (particularly Ho Hos.)
Each of the actors who bring these men to life on the stage deliver strong performances with Jeffery V. Thompson dominating as the humanly humorous Bishop and Che Ayende giving a searing look at the pain of the 30 year old who discovers he has passed HIV to his wife.
As good as each individual performance is, it is the work of the group as an ensemble that is most impressive, and it is in those scenes where the entire group delivers dialogue in a chant that the production soars the highest.
Arena’s production is the world premiere of the piece, although it had a reading last year at Busboys and Poets in Washington and workshops at both Hartford Stage in Connecticut and here at Arena. Once this first full production completes its run in Arena’s Crystal City location, it will transfer to Hartford Stage for the second half of a shared premiere.
<i>Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a website covering theater in the region (<a href=http://www.PotomacStages.com> www.PotomacStages.com</a>). He can be reached at <a href=mailto:Brad@PotomacStages.com> Brad@PotomacStages.com</a>.</i>