Emergence-See!

So a slave ship pops up in the Hudson river, right next to the Statue of Liberty. Naturally, this causes somewhat of a stir. It's a striking image in itself, even before the added complication of entangling its standalone potential with a narrative on its repercussions. Harder still, one might reasonably suspect, for one man to cast any light into a racial web which, in this case, is anything but black and white.

But that's exactly what Daniel Beaty asserts to do in his one man show, Emergence-See! Focusing on the Johnson family, while playing a huge cast of peripheral characters both real and surreal, Beaty uses the emergence of the slave ship, aptly named 'Remembrance' to scrutinise the way a black community handles the legacy of slavery. Most obviously, Beaty's character acting from "militant black" to the middle class professor who escaped from the Projects, plus a script with bags of humour and pathos are reason enough to flag this up as a superb piece of theatre. So too is Beaty's singing: an impressive interpreter, his voice journeys through the rasp of '20s blues, the bass baritone of Paul Robeson and, finally, modern hip-hop styles, pulling at the threads of an assumed idea of 'blackness'.

Indeed, Beaty's play never simply lists conflicting viewpoints from some monolithic dark-skinned community. Befitting the amorality of the slave trade, any attempt to moralise on behalf of the descendants of slaves are similarly satirised. The simplistic claim of Anton, the Jamaican who claims that "we all have white bones," is undermined by his farcical insistence upon listing his ethnicity as 'white' on job applications. Instead, Beaty engages in the tussle between a black identity as presented by whites ("put some chocolate in those crayons, Walt!") and black attempts at self-identification ("Oprah is calling this a full-circle 'aha' moment!").

An African American himself, Beaty portrays dark-skinned characters from both African and Carribean descent. The distillation of obviously dissimilar immigrant groups into one actor is a tricky conceit, designed to forge a consideration of whether these groups are indeed united by shared injustices, shared prejudices, and a shared language of the oppressed. Or is this simply a trick of the stage, a neat metaphor on language via the backdrop of a slam poetry competition, a narrative invention? They are tough questions. But then again, they'd have to be – the issue of how a bloody great slave ship appears in the Hudson river in the first place pales in comparison.