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No-holds-barred satire blasts off at Karamu
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By: FRAN HELLER Contributing Writer
“Fasten your shackles” intones the perky stewardess on a slave ship bound for Savannah.
Thus begins a journey through 300 years of history in George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play “The Colored Museum,” a no-holds-barred satiric riff on what it means to be black in America. It’s at Karamu Performing Arts Theatre through Feb. 19.
At once funny and irreverent, the play topples the myths and stereotypes surrounding black culture, ranging from slavery and Ebony magazine to hair styles and Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 landmark drama “Raisin in the Sun.”
Written with lacerating wit and deep compassion, “The Colored Museum” serves as a humorous antidote for dealing with a history of oppression and suffering.
The revue-like format consists of 11 skits, not all of equal merit. But a first-rate production directed by Caroline Jackson Smith and an all-star cast shore up the weaker vignettes, resulting in an evening that is at once entertaining and sobering, as well as laugh-out-loud funny with an undercurrent of pain.
The play is set in a museum, a repository where the “myths and madness of black/Negro/colored Americans are stored.”
Portraits of black America and African masks grace the white walls of John Konopka’s rendition of a museum. A hand-driven turntable makes for seamless transitions between skits.
Dressed in a mini-skirted, hot-pink suit, her face frozen in a Cheshire-cat grin, Kimberly Brown percolates energy as the stewardess Miss Pat in the opening segment “Git on Board.”
As the slave ship hurtles through a time warp, hyped by Richard H. Morris Jr.’s lighting and sound effects, the stewardess warns her slaves that they will have to suffer through 300 years of history. But, she reassures them, they will emerge with a culture so complex, including the best dances and basketball millionaires, that even the likes of William Faulkner and George Gershwin will take notice.
There is even a line in the play that refers to Gershwin’s simpatico with blacks, given his membership in another oppressed people. While there is nothing overtly Jewish about “The Colored Museum,” there is everything Jewish about a story of assimilation and search for identity. Using self-parody to alleviate pain and suffering is also very Jewish.
In “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” Stephanie Stovall rustles up a batch of Negro babies, whose ingredients are a composite of the Negro character. The sketch fizzles, but Stovall’s droll caricature of an Aunt Jemima prototype and Jimmie Woody as her moonshine-swigging sidekick Missa Foot are peerless.
Morris Cammon’s costumes are terrific here and everywhere.
Music director Courtney-Savali L. Andrews at the piano serves the many sounds of music that are intrinsic to the skits, much of it original music created by several cast members.
All of the sketches revolve around issues of identity.
In “The Photo Session,” Katrice Monee Headd and G. Carlos Henderson portray a pair of fashion models who take refuge inside Ebony magazine as a means of escaping their heritage, only to experience a different kind of pain, “the kind of pain that comes from feeling no pain at all.”
In “Symbiosis,” Henderson impersonates a middle-class businessman trying to shed his past. As The Man drops the contents of his upscale shopping bag into the garbage can, including his first pair of Converse sneakers, a jar of pomade and Temptation records, his younger rebellious self, personified by Woody as The Kid, puts up a fight.
The segment epitomizes what the playwright calls the schizoid personality of the black man. “Black American culture is a very fragmented thing,” said Wolfe. “We’re all trying to come up with some definition of what we are. My absolute definition of me is the schizophrenia, the contradiction.”
Nothing is funny about “Soldier with a Secret,” in which Woody portrays a Vietnam soldier who has died and come back to life. The soldier embarks upon a bizarre scheme to kill off his fellow black infantrymen as a means of saving them from an even more painful future facing them back home. Richard H. Morris Jr.’s dappled lighting creates a jungle-like backdrop for the soldier’s grim fantasy.
My vote for the most hilarious vignette was “The Hairpiece” in which Stovall and Headd play two bewigged talking heads, vying for the crown of their mistress (Brown), a woman who has gone totally bald after years of “frying, dying and de-chemicalizing her hair.” Will she choose the kinky black Afro or “Barbie doll tresses dipped in chocolate”? Centerpiece of the revue is “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” a farcical sendup of Lorraine Hansberry’s drama of social realism, “Raisin in the Sun,” Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls … ,” and the kind of black musicals that white audiences are conditioned to expect.
I’m still chuckling over the charismatic Stovall’s over-the-top performance as the weary, Bible-totin’ Mama who lands a mean punch on her disgruntled son when he takes God’s name in vain.
Woody plays the aggrieved son Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie Jones with mock exaggeration. Brown’s Lady-in-Plaid mimics the style of Shange’s performance piece, while Headd as Medea Jones, speaks in classical tongues she picked up at Julliard, which nobody understands.
Each actor tries to out-emote the other and win an Oscar from the Narrator for the effort.
In the final sketch, Headd portrays Topsy Washington, a party animal who finds that the only way to live is not to flee from or deny the past, but to accept it and move on. As Topsy says, speaking in the voice of the playwright, “And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.”
Wolfe, a two-time Tony Award-winning director (“Angels in America, Part I, The Millennium Approaches” in 1993 and “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” in 1996), served as artistic director of New York’s Public Theatre. A playwright, composer and producer, as well as director, Wolfe recently stepped down from the helm to resume playwriting.
Artistic director Terrence Spivey wants to return the 90-year-old Karamu theater and the nation’s oldest African-American theater to its former halcyon days. With topnotch productions like “The Colored Museum,” the theater is well on its way.
Karamu Performing Arts Theatre is at 2355 East 89th St., just south of The Cleveland Play House. Tickets: 216-795-7077.
Thus begins a journey through 300 years of history in George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play “The Colored Museum,” a no-holds-barred satiric riff on what it means to be black in America. It’s at Karamu Performing Arts Theatre through Feb. 19.
At once funny and irreverent, the play topples the myths and stereotypes surrounding black culture, ranging from slavery and Ebony magazine to hair styles and Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 landmark drama “Raisin in the Sun.”
Written with lacerating wit and deep compassion, “The Colored Museum” serves as a humorous antidote for dealing with a history of oppression and suffering.
The revue-like format consists of 11 skits, not all of equal merit. But a first-rate production directed by Caroline Jackson Smith and an all-star cast shore up the weaker vignettes, resulting in an evening that is at once entertaining and sobering, as well as laugh-out-loud funny with an undercurrent of pain.
The play is set in a museum, a repository where the “myths and madness of black/Negro/colored Americans are stored.”
Portraits of black America and African masks grace the white walls of John Konopka’s rendition of a museum. A hand-driven turntable makes for seamless transitions between skits.
Dressed in a mini-skirted, hot-pink suit, her face frozen in a Cheshire-cat grin, Kimberly Brown percolates energy as the stewardess Miss Pat in the opening segment “Git on Board.”
As the slave ship hurtles through a time warp, hyped by Richard H. Morris Jr.’s lighting and sound effects, the stewardess warns her slaves that they will have to suffer through 300 years of history. But, she reassures them, they will emerge with a culture so complex, including the best dances and basketball millionaires, that even the likes of William Faulkner and George Gershwin will take notice.
There is even a line in the play that refers to Gershwin’s simpatico with blacks, given his membership in another oppressed people. While there is nothing overtly Jewish about “The Colored Museum,” there is everything Jewish about a story of assimilation and search for identity. Using self-parody to alleviate pain and suffering is also very Jewish.
In “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” Stephanie Stovall rustles up a batch of Negro babies, whose ingredients are a composite of the Negro character. The sketch fizzles, but Stovall’s droll caricature of an Aunt Jemima prototype and Jimmie Woody as her moonshine-swigging sidekick Missa Foot are peerless.
Morris Cammon’s costumes are terrific here and everywhere.
Music director Courtney-Savali L. Andrews at the piano serves the many sounds of music that are intrinsic to the skits, much of it original music created by several cast members.
All of the sketches revolve around issues of identity.
In “The Photo Session,” Katrice Monee Headd and G. Carlos Henderson portray a pair of fashion models who take refuge inside Ebony magazine as a means of escaping their heritage, only to experience a different kind of pain, “the kind of pain that comes from feeling no pain at all.”
In “Symbiosis,” Henderson impersonates a middle-class businessman trying to shed his past. As The Man drops the contents of his upscale shopping bag into the garbage can, including his first pair of Converse sneakers, a jar of pomade and Temptation records, his younger rebellious self, personified by Woody as The Kid, puts up a fight.
The segment epitomizes what the playwright calls the schizoid personality of the black man. “Black American culture is a very fragmented thing,” said Wolfe. “We’re all trying to come up with some definition of what we are. My absolute definition of me is the schizophrenia, the contradiction.”
Nothing is funny about “Soldier with a Secret,” in which Woody portrays a Vietnam soldier who has died and come back to life. The soldier embarks upon a bizarre scheme to kill off his fellow black infantrymen as a means of saving them from an even more painful future facing them back home. Richard H. Morris Jr.’s dappled lighting creates a jungle-like backdrop for the soldier’s grim fantasy.
My vote for the most hilarious vignette was “The Hairpiece” in which Stovall and Headd play two bewigged talking heads, vying for the crown of their mistress (Brown), a woman who has gone totally bald after years of “frying, dying and de-chemicalizing her hair.” Will she choose the kinky black Afro or “Barbie doll tresses dipped in chocolate”? Centerpiece of the revue is “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” a farcical sendup of Lorraine Hansberry’s drama of social realism, “Raisin in the Sun,” Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls … ,” and the kind of black musicals that white audiences are conditioned to expect.
I’m still chuckling over the charismatic Stovall’s over-the-top performance as the weary, Bible-totin’ Mama who lands a mean punch on her disgruntled son when he takes God’s name in vain.
Woody plays the aggrieved son Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie Jones with mock exaggeration. Brown’s Lady-in-Plaid mimics the style of Shange’s performance piece, while Headd as Medea Jones, speaks in classical tongues she picked up at Julliard, which nobody understands.
Each actor tries to out-emote the other and win an Oscar from the Narrator for the effort.
In the final sketch, Headd portrays Topsy Washington, a party animal who finds that the only way to live is not to flee from or deny the past, but to accept it and move on. As Topsy says, speaking in the voice of the playwright, “And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.”
Wolfe, a two-time Tony Award-winning director (“Angels in America, Part I, The Millennium Approaches” in 1993 and “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” in 1996), served as artistic director of New York’s Public Theatre. A playwright, composer and producer, as well as director, Wolfe recently stepped down from the helm to resume playwriting.
Artistic director Terrence Spivey wants to return the 90-year-old Karamu theater and the nation’s oldest African-American theater to its former halcyon days. With topnotch productions like “The Colored Museum,” the theater is well on its way.
Karamu Performing Arts Theatre is at 2355 East 89th St., just south of The Cleveland Play House. Tickets: 216-795-7077.
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