Through the Night

Westwood, California – Empty stage. An actor appears and proceeds to divide himself into six characters. First he’s a ghetto kid who was stuck in special-ed and now, because of loved ones’ guts and effort, he’s accepted into a college.  Then, seamlessly, he’s a gay businessman whose father is a hellfire minister who believes that gay is sin. Then, a little shuffling of the feet and he becomes the 300 pounds of a well-intentioned minister who shows up at an OA meeting because he’s eating himself to death. Then he’s a store owner who believes that a health food store can survive in the ghetto where everyone is killing themselves on soul food. Then he’s his young son in his father’s health food store who is trying to conjure up the right concoction to save souls, and finally he’s a ghetto kid who has got his girl pregnant, given her HIV, and he’s praying for God to make the baby born HIV-free.

Daniel Beaty is the single actor who, for 85 minutes, moves seamlessly from character to character, playing out their stories. Remarkable presentation! But what to call this performance? Beaty calls it a “soul aria.” He talks, he stalks, he sings, he raps. The story is sort of a cry for salvation of the black man trapped in the ghetto. Let’s call it inspirational because, although it is a tad “romantic” in concept — a dream beyond the reality — every once in a while, it catches the heart and brings a little gasp and a tear to the eye, and at the conclusion, his audience was on its feet with appreciation for the tour-de-force performance.

It’s a poem about courage. The businessman hasn’t the courage to face his well-intentioned hellfire minister father to tell him that he’s gay. The “slow” schoolboy is now about to leave for college to be set free, and his girlfriend seduces him into sex without a condom which will leave him forever trapped in the ghetto. The little boy is only searching for the right concoction to help all these folk find the courage to rise up out of their suffocating lives.

Although it is beyond reality,  it’s one hell of a performance, and what Daniel Beaty dreams for the kid in the suffocating ghetto, for the man who wants at least an AIDS-free child, for the gay guy who knows he must face his charismatic Bible-shouting father, is a good dream. I thought it a few minutes too long, but on the other hand, you won’t see a tour de force like this often. It’s a piece that ought to be shown in schools, inspiring for kids, and is part of the dream all of us have in these hard, unloving and barely hopeful times.

Beaty is an award-winning writer/performer whose solo play, Emergence-See, had an Off-Broadway, sold-out extended run. You have to see this guy in action. Changing voices, rapping, singing… Entertaining and inspirational.

At The Geffen in Westwood, California; 85 minutes; no intermission.