'Colored Museum' is still meaningful
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When George C. Wolfe's "Colored Museum" opened in 1986, critics loved its bold skewering of black stereotypes and unblinking look at absurd contradictions of race.
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Nu Black Arts West Theater's current production shows that the pain and inanity Wolfe saw in the '80s still resonate today.
Director Kibibi Monié and six other cast members crash into the canons of African-American theater and punch holes in the superficial glaze of the black experience served up by Hollywood and Ebony magazine.
The play opens fittingly with Miss Pat, a stewardess on the Celebrity Slave Ship. With a frenetic gaiety, Miss Pat, played by Mya Brown, reminds her passengers to mind the "fasten-shackles" signs. She consoles her "guests" with the knowledge that from their pain will arise a complex culture and the Watusi dance craze. "(And) just think what you will mean to Faulkner," Miss Pat asks.
Through the following 10 "exhibits," the play chronicles the twisted struggle of African Americans attempting to escape the roles already prescribed for them and their legacy of suffering. Georgi Page and Gael To'mas Jones parody two Ebony models living in a world of popping flashes and brilliant smiles, where no one ever "says anything profound or meaningful" and there is no pain. Hair is still the emblem of black baggage. Wolfe tackles the ever-present politics of hair in the hilarious and bizarre sketch called "Hairpiece." Two mannequins, one sporting an Afro wig and the other wavy, silky tresses, trade barbs, each hoping to be chosen by their owner - a woman who's scorched herself bald with chemical relaxers.
Another sketch, "The Last Mamma On The Couch Play," slams the genre of melodramatic plays inspired by "A Raisin in the Sun" and lampoons black, feel-good musicals. Antonio Akins, the tuxedo-clad narrator, introduces Mama, perched on her sofa dreaming middle-class dreams in the dreary ghetto.
Her angry son, Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie-Jones, is forever fighting "the man" and going nowhere. His Juilliard-trained sister, Medea, glides about the living room triumphantly announcing that her suffering has become "classical and universal." And Walter's wife bemoans her lot in life - being a woman and black - and spends much of the sketch crying for her sisters across the country.
Though it's been 14 years since this play premiered, the warped identity struggles plaguing Wolfe's characters continue to haunt today. And "The Colored Museum" still has ample opportunity to coax a crooked smile.