Produced with electric vitality at Studio Theatre, George C. Wolfe’s damning satire told in 11 vignettes and directed by Psalmayene 24 refuses to become another artifact.
Melissa Lin Sturges July 12th, 2024 for the Washington City Paper
“You are allowed to laugh audibly” reads a note from playwright Dominique Morisseau’s “Rules of Engagement, excerpted in Studio Theatre’s program for The Colored Museum. Morisseau’s note is a reminder to audiences that, despite the toxicity they might encounter in the 11 vignettes that compose George C. Wolfe’s play, the story is fundamentally satirical. Arguably one of the most incisive and methodical satires of the 20th century, The Colored Museum invites audiences to sit with discomfort and embrace humor openly as they confront the absurd contradictions of what it means to be Black in America.
Needless to say, laughter abounded throughout the audience the night I saw The Colored Museum, directed by Psalmayene 24 and playing at Studio through Aug. 11. Wolfe’s play features a series of satirical sketches presented as though exhibits in a museum. A commentary on the coloniality of museums themselves, these episodes depict various themes and stories about Black American life and history—ranging from questions of artistic assimilation and representation to enslavement. Under Psalm’s careful but abundantly creative direction—and with an ironically carnivalesque aesthetic—the production casts light onto that which is inherently ridiculous and ill-conceived throughout these histories.
Upon entering the theater, audiences are greeted by a display of artwork inspired by Wolfe’s play and constructed by visual arts students at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Moving further into the theater, Natsu Onoda Power (credited here as environmental designer rather than set designer) has constructed a multifaceted museum display complete with equal elements of panache and voyeurism. From a semi-urban living room to a boudoir and the jungles of Vietnam, these seamlessly transitioning design elements are aided by Kelly Colburn’s vivid but nuanced projections, which just as easily summon Black iconography as they do a sense of anonymity. Yet, it is the layout of the audience itself that holds the most political edge. What at first feels like an arbitrary replacement of traditional theater seats with plywood benches is quickly understood to represent the hold of a cargo ship from which, in a jarring moment, Ayanna Bria Bakari introduces herself as Miss Pat, our rosy cruise attendant aboard the “Celebrity Slaveship.”
After earning accolades as a playwright with the 1986 premiere of The Colored Museum, five-time Tony Award winner Wolfe rose to further theatrical acclaim after directing parts one and two of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America on Broadway in 1993 and 1994. In 2020, he directed the film adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. While Wolfe is more publicly recognized as a director than a playwright, The Colored Museum demonstrates an impenetrable vision through which the theatergoers’ relationship to the events of stage is explored from the get-go.
On the night I attended, about three-quarters of the audience was White, calling to mind Wolfe’s recommendation that “The best houses are half-Black and half-White. There’s a dangerous tension that has to resolve itself in laughter.” Wolfe feels more interested in exploring and embracing tension than in any attempts to resolve such tension, and suggests there is no better way of doing so in this play than the collective responses of laughter and awe. Notably, Studio will also host a Black Out Night on July 26 to honor and prioritize Black theatergoers’ experiences more fully. With the intent to impact, challenge, and at times radicalize those who attend his plays, Wolfe says in a 1986 interview that “In many respects, the central character of [The Colored Museum] is the audience.”
That is not to say that this excellent cast of five (Bakari, Kelli Blackwell, Iris Beaumier, Matthew Elijah Webb, and William Oliver Watkins) did not step up to the task at hand. Standout performances included Watkins and Webb playing two parts of the same person in a face-off examination of assimilatory Blackness, and the perfectly timed Blackwell, astonished to find herself in the midst of an argument with her two talking wigs. Plus, Beaumier dazzles as the Black diva Lala Lamazing Grace, but just as easily accesses this character’s vulnerability during one of the play’s few instances of visible tenderness imparted by child actor Ruth Benson in a cameo appearance.
Far and away this play’s most scathing indictment of American theater is a vignette entitled “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” a not-so-subtle parody of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. This pastiche is not a criticism of Hansberry’s work (a pioneering Black woman playwright who Wolfe greatly admires, but who at the time faced pushback for downplaying Black radicalism), but rather a means to examine and to push the work further. As the actors battle over whose storyline is the most tragic, they similarly grapple for a literal Oscar statue, claiming victory for each overindulgent monologue and gratuitous development in this play-within-a-play.
With a live soundtrack by Kysia Bostic and with Jabari Exum as the production’s onstage drummer (pulling double duty as a nighttime museum security guard), the play has a mellifluous quality to it as well. This culminates into a final musical number only described by Wolfe as a “vocal and visual cacophony, which builds and builds” toward embracing contradictions and finding power in righteous madness. Produced with electric vitality, this damning satire enters a new century at Studio Theatre. But at the end of the day, The Colored Museum refuses to consider itself another artifact, looking instead toward a more constructive social future.
The Colored Museum, written by George C. Wolfe and directed by Psalmayene 24, plays at Studio Theater through Aug. 11; Black Out Night starts at 8 p.m. on July 26. studiotheatre.org. $25-$114.
