By Jordi Galceran
Directed by Sergi Belbel
Tickets available here from September 18-November 3.
Laugh Audibly: The Colored Museum Confronts the Absurd Contradictions of What it Means to be Black in America
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.
‘The Colored Museum’ gets an impressive revival
Psalmayene 24 directs a new take on George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play at Studio Theatre.
Review by Trey Graham July 9, 2024 for the Washington Post
Before he staged “Angels in America” on Broadway, before he took the helm at the Public Theater in New York, before he moved into filmmaking and brought us “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Rustin,” George C. Wolfe was a wet-behind-the-ears playwright whose experimental off-Broadway musical “Paradise” had just been demolished by the New York Times. What better time for a young Black writer to square his shoulders and take a swing at the titans of 20th-century African American culture?
The room was demonstrably ready when “The Colored Museum” opened at New Jersey’s Crossroads Theatre in 1986. The Times’s Frank Rich saluted the performers’ “stinging parodies,” praising the “pacing and unity” of an evening that’s basically a dozen dark-comedy sketches. The Washington Post’s David Richards hailed the playwright as one with “an antic imagination, a passionate sense of comedy and a welcome willingness to step on everyone’s toes.”
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What pins critics’ ears reliably back about “The Colored Museum” is “The Last Mama-On-the-Couch Play,” an affectionate but withering centerpiece skewering a half-century’s worth of Black theater landmarks: dramas such as “A Raisin in the Sun” and “For Colored Girls” and all-Black musicals like “Cabin in the Sky” and “Purlie.” Whatever the merits of those shows, Wolfe notes acerbically that their authors still traffic in frustrating stereotypes, locking Black characters into old positions and inviting White audiences just far enough in to snack casually on Black trauma before catching a late supper at the oyster bar across the way. Nor do Black actors escape the nip of Wolfe’s teeth: Watch the cast of Psalmayene 24’s handsome new Studio Theatre production scramble for possession of the Oscar statuette that gets passed around, even as Wolfe’s barbs about overacting detonate like tart little truth bombs.
The director, fresh off the Folger Theatre’s richly textured but curiously unmoving refresh of Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” fares far better with “The Colored Museum,” a show similarly episodic in structure but much less dependent on tone. With less of the supernatural to integrate, and without the self-imposed addition of a unifying conceit, he and his cast — Matthew Elijah Webb, Kelli Blackwell, Ayanna Bria Bakari, Iris Beaumier and William Oliver Watkins are the tight ensemble, with drummer Jabari Exum drawing their efforts even more impressively together — can focus on squeezing each sketch for its individual vitality.
Thus does the evening have the breadth to satisfyingly explore the emotional price paid by a Josephine Baker-style chanteuse (Beaumier) who has sacrificed the simplicities of her Mississippi childhood to transform herself into a global sophisticate, while also reserving just the right sparkle and sass for a sequence in which a woman (Blackwell) getting dressed for a breakup dinner argues with her two unexpectedly sentient wigs — Beaumier and Bakari, one an exuberant Angela Davis-level Afro, the other a silkier Mariah Carey waterfall — over which of them will help her project the right Strong Black Woman vibe for the occasion.
Thus, too, does the production have stylistic room for the bitter honesty of Webb’s vivid “snap queen” Miss Roj, who would just as soon destroy you as let you get under his skin; the haunted and haunting “kindness” of a Vietnam soldier (a superbly contained Watkins) whose ghost goes about quietly killing his platoon in their sleep to spare them the grief and abuse he sees awaiting them back home; and the commandingly elemental innocence of Normal Jean Reynolds (the mesmerizing Bakari), a grubby red-dirt teenager with a deeply eerie monologue about how she came to give birth to an egg.
Famously, Wolfe framed “The Colored Museum” as a string of exhibits exploding the ways Black Americans tell and are told in their own stories. Psalmayene 24 and designer Natsu Onoda Power lean into the notion with a casually environmental approach that, not unlike Rorschach Theatre’s “Human Museum” earlier this season, reframes the Studio lobbies and parts of the Victor Shargai Theatre itself as an exhibition space wherein compact installations invite further reflection on the corresponding scenes — so take time before and after curtain to explore.
Even more famously, Wolfe bookends the show’s action with a skit welcoming audiences aboard a slave ship that’s either sailing the Middle Passage or time-warping its way through to the present, or both. Regardless, Power has transformed the theater space into the wood-benched deck of a merchant vessel, aboard which a cheerily hospitable cabin attendant (Bakari) warns patrons that drumming won’t be tolerated and that the Fasten Your Shackles sign must be closely observed. So maybe don’t bring your more easily offended theatergoing buddies.
Do bring a sense of hope, though: Wolfe’s “Museum” invites visitors to consider what kinds of pain are formative and what kinds are just poisonous: what’s key to remember and what’s safe to forget. Once visiting hours are over, Bakari’s travel guide returns, reminding audiences to check the overhead bins for anything we really want to take with us. Anything we choose to leave behind, she promises warmly, gets chucked straight into the trash.
The Colored Museum, through Aug. 11 at Studio Theatre in Washington. About 1 hour 30 minutes without intermission. studiotheatre.org.
1980 (Or Why I’m Voting For John Anderson) by Patricia Cotter at the Road Theatre Company Summer Playrights Festival
On July 20th the reading of 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting for John Anderson) will be at the Road Theater Company as part of their SPF summer festival.
Written By Patricia Cotter
Directed By Meeghan Holaway
“1980 (Or Why I’m Voting For John Anderson)” is a comedy about class, race, and the politics of hope. In 1980 it seemed that unknown congressman, John Anderson, might have a shot to be a contender for President. In a Boston campaign office, four very different (and very lost) people come together with a dream that their long-shot candidate will change their country and their lives.
Ablaze with talent, ‘The Colored Museum’ at Studio Theatre plays against type
The brilliantly reconceived show entertains hilariously while inviting audiences to see through social stereotypes to what’s inside.
By John Stoltenberg July 9, 2024 for DC Theatre Arts
Studio Theatre makes no bones about the fact The Colored Museum has itself become a museum piece. George C. Wolfe wrote the satire of African American culture in 1986 when he was 31, and his incisive script is chockablock with back-then mentions. Now playing at Studio, nearly 40 years on, is director Psalmayene 24’s brilliant reconception of the show, ablaze with talent, without a word updated. No need. The deep truths still throb.
The play is structured as a series of eleven “exhibits” — blackout sketches, really — each zeroing in on and exorcising an aspect of the Black psyche and experience in white America in the unresolved aftermath of slavery. Performed by five incredibly versatile actor/singers (Ayanna Bria Bakari, Kelli Blackwell, Iris Beaumier, Matthew Elijah Webb, William Oliver Watkins) in a fantastic array of costumes designed by Moyenda Kulameka, the play entertains hilariously while simultaneously inviting audiences to see through social stereotypes the contradictions and pain inside.
The production plunges the audience immediately into full-on immersion. An eerily evocative environment designed by Natsu Onoda Power features a massive sculptural slave ship in whose wood-slat hull the audience sits on benches facing a stage set resembling an art gallery. In darkness, an intense drumbeat by dextrous percussionist Jabari Exum signals the start of a Middle Passage emulation. Archival engravings of the enslaved appear, among many stunning projections designed by Kelly Colburn. Miss Pat, a pert-in-pink flight attendant played with saccharine sarcasm by Ayanna Bria Bakari, welcomes us passengers aboard and advises us to fasten our shackles. Then a turbulent storm of a time warp blows up — its alarming light effects by Jesse Belsky and sound effects by Matthew M. Nielson — and Bakari displays a knock-out knack for physical comedy.
And so it goes: facetious farce spliced and diced with past pain.
By far the most laugh-out-loud scene, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” features all five actors in what seems a snippy sendup of A Raisin in the Sun: one tough Mama on a sofa in a housedress (Blackwell), her son Walter (Watkins) done gone out of his mind with rage at The Man, his regal wife the Lady in Plaid (Beaumier), and his Juilliard-trained sister (Bakari), all hilariously overacting and awarded a gold statuette by tux-clad emcee Webb. Mama’s self-righteous religiosity is reflected in stained glass projections, and in a full-blown parody of a big Black Broadway musical, Walter does a show-stopping minstrel-ish dance (choreography by Tony Thomas).
As with many of the exhibits in The Colored Museum, exactly what’s being exorcised may be obscured by all the mockery and amusement. In writing this “Last Mama” scene, for instance, was George C. Wolfe perhaps not merely parodying but paying disrespect? Not according to this museum-style placard posted on the set:
Lorraine Hansberry is a wonderful playwright and A Raisin in the Sun is a wonderful play, but every February all the regional theaters discover black people because it’s Black History Month and they pull out Raisin in the Sun. I want to remove these dead, stale, empty icons blocking me from my own truth. — George C. Wolfe
The fabulousness and shallowness of high fashion get a ribbing in “The Photo Session” as two glammed-up Ebony mag models (Iris Beaumier and Matthew Elijah Webb) strike pose after pose and smile away their contradictions and pain. In a bit called “The Hairpiece,” two talking wig stands (Bakari and Beaumier) snipe about the woman (Blackwell) who’s doing her face before a date to break up with her fool boyfriend. It’s broad variety-show sketch comedy, the stuff of surefire TV ratings, except with a subversive race-specific subtext about not blocking one’s truth.
By far the darkest scene is about a wounded soldier (Watkins) who sees only pain in his future, dies in combat, then returns to heal the hurt of other “colored boys” by mercy-killing them. The monodrama lands like a grenade.
By contrast is the resilience and defiance of Miss Rog (Webb), a self-ID’ed “alien.” In a neon-lit scene in a gay bar called The Bottomless Pit, wearing a see-through glitter shirt and striped “Annette Funicello” patio pants, Miss Rog throws back drinks and rebukes anyone who crosses her with a drop-dead finger snap. Nothing in this show can be said to be too over the top.
In yet another larger-than life performance, Beaumier plays LaLa Lamazing Grace, an extravagantly garbed chanteuse who futilely sought freedom from U.S. racism in France. “What’s left is the girl inside,” she says ruefully — cue the entrance (from a cage) of doll-like tween Ruth Benson.
The finale is a big blow-out dance party scene with each of the five cast members attired as one of their memorable roles. They sing and vow to “dance to the music of the madness in me.” It’s an exilharating finish to a wild ride of a show..
Studio Theatre’s The Colored Museum has been curated with top-tier talent, a timeless eye on the past, and a trust that outrageously entertaining theater can speak healing truth.
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.
The Colored Museum plays through August 11, 2024, in the Victor Shargai space at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($40–$95, with low-cost options and discounts available) online or by calling the box office at (202) 332-3300.
The program for The Colored Museum is online here.