I wish I could say that I loved "The Tallest Tree in the Forest" but I can't. I wanted to. A play about the great black actor and activist Paul Robeson, directed by Moises Kaufman, should be right up my alley. Unfortunately I do not respond well to one-man/woman shows no matter how talented the actor, in this case Daniel Beaty.
Beaty makes for a splendid Robeson. He can sing. He has a voice to match Robeson's own and the songs were pure bliss to listen to, accompanied as he is by a small group of excellent musicians on-stage throughout the two hour performance. He can act, as he proves to us as he vocally cycles through multiple characters who touched on Robeson's life. I wish he hadn't. I wish he had stuck to being Robeson and had a few other actors to play these roles. I suppose one reason for this may be that Daniel Beaty is a good deal shorter than Robeson was and, as such, this would have presented some problems in casting. But there were too many characters for him to play and it was confusing, many of them sounding too much alike.
The play is also too linear for my taste. We get the full progression of Robeson's life from boy to husband to successful actor, singer and activist and on to his old age, alone and defeated. But even with the seemingly detailed progression of his life important chunks are left out. His work with O'Neill on "All God's Chillun Got Wings" is in but not the more important "The Emperor Jones," for example.
What does work though is when he addresses Robeson's political beliefs: his journey to The Soviet Union through war-time Berlin, his appearance before the House Un-American Activities and the ambiguity of his relationship with the Soviet Union once his Jewish friends there begin to be persecuted. The moral dilemna for him is whether he can criticize the country where he, a black man, feels equal even as others are made to feel they are not. Now this is the play about Robeson I wanted to see.
