The Colored Museum
Dramaturgical Production Notebook

This section covers the range of responses both of the production and of the play in general.

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• Response to the Production
• Overall Response to the Play
• Footnotes

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Response to the Production
The production ran for two nights (March 3 and 4), both of which were sold out. The waitlist lines were long. Observing the people waiting to get a ticket, it was easy to see that some of them were honestly worried about not being able to see the show. Some were upset that they were number twenty in a line of forty-five.

Highly advertised, The Colored Museum was also reviewed pre-showing for the newspaper. Even though the student writer saw the production before it was completed, she still includes an important incorporation of student work. She specifically says, "The performance is complete with an all-black musical choreographed by Lauren Curry '07."¹ While Rochelle (the co-director) is not a student, all other aspects of this show were done by the students of Mount Holyoke College.

On the first night, March 3, a talkback was held. Four faculty members were invited to be on the panel for the show. Their foci included sociology, black American history, theater, and anthropology. A large group of people stayed behind for the talkbacks (approximately eighty), and, after the 30-minute marker was announced, about thirty people still stayed to continue talking.

Many people did not wish to talk about the theatrical elements of the play. Although the discussion opened up with a discussion about Brechtian structure of the play, it was quickly morphed into a discussion about having white actors act in the play (which someone noted as a possible Brechtian situation of alienation). Instead of focusing on the play itself, both the panelists and those who attended the talkbacks wanted to discuss race, communication, and the history behind the play.

The play did open up new avenues of conversation. People discussed what made the play funny (or made the play not funny, for that matter) as well as how they saw this play as a documentation (or not) of black history. "I don't know why you're laughing," said one student at the talkbacks, "this whole time, I was crying." She referred to the comment that black stereotypes, when looked at in the right light, were funny.

While many people saw the play as a success, a few disliked it. One student said that she felt the play was full of stereotypes and reproduced them for no reason. One of the co-directors, Aida, said that there was a student who said that the ending of the play "was a bummer" but the rest of it was good. There were several students who saw it and thought it was funny, but they then felt guilty because they thought they were racist for laughing at racial stereotypes. Another student said that the play seemed like a less complete Vagina Monologues for black Americans.

Addressing the issue of race in America is not an easy task. Some of the people who saw the show were worried about being perceived as racists simply because they thought it was funny. Others didn't understand -- or care about -- the main goal of the show, which was to embrace and make fun of black stereotypes.

As a theatrical piece, however, the show was very successful. Not only were there lines to get on the waitlist, but the show also generated a hubbub, which was the goal. Obviously, the directors wanted people to see the play, but if people saw the play and went home without another thought to it, it really didn't do its job. However, the show seemed to generate discussion beyond the talkbacks and the classroom, for many a conversation at the dinner table was filled with a reference or two to The Colored Museum.

Overall Response to the Play
"Mr. Wolfe has attempted a panorama of black history and come out with a confused collage." This is one of the commentaries that has come from a review of The Colored Museum in its earliest history. During its opening run at the Crossroads theater, one of the critics said that the production gets all the credit, while the play itself fails².

This same critic also writes about the specific scene, "Photo Session". "What this has to do with being specifically black, as opposed to a generally exploited mannequin-type, is baffling."³ This critic apparently assumed that, for a play to be about black history or black culture, all scenes within it must be one-hundred percent applicable to only black Americans, which George C. Wolfe never wanted. (See Playwright Chronology for more information.)

Another criticism of the play is that it is demeaning to black people, for it reproduces stereotypes on stage without purpose or with a purpose that could get lost on the audience. "The Colored Museum has been criticized in some quarters as demeaning the black experience by trivializing oppression that is too horrible for humor." ⁴ On the other hand, there are many who believe it is refreshing to see an author review black history in a new light.

Another issue deals with making such a play a text; what if a director puts together a production of The Colored Museum that is purposefully racist? Because the text relies heavily on commentary from slide shows and the use of subtext, this can easily be done.

When the play was chosen to move to the Public Theatre, the critics spend most of their time and space reviewing the content of the play rather than criticizing it. While certain words or phrases gave the critics positive opinions of the play away, none of them overtly spouted love for George C. Wolfe or his play.

"While The Colored Museum may sound depressing, it's not. Mr. Wolfe is always lobbing in wisecracks about Michael Jackson's nose or The Color Purple."⁵ The critics seemed happy that the play was vastly entertaining with subtext as well as full of energy. While the review of the Crossroad production was highly critical, the reviews for the Public were much more positive.

"Brian Martin's sleek all-purpose set, of an antiseptic modern museum displaying exhibits of 'colored' history, is a civilized repository of black America's ancestral baggage. But the past can't be so neatly stored away. There is nothing civilized about the gruesome slide show, depicting the horrors of slavery, that overwhelms the museum's impersonal walls in the prologue."⁶ This is a good example of subtle text allowing the reader to see the author's bias. "Sleek" and "all-purpose" both point to a positive view of the show. Indeed, this is how many reviewers covered the show.

The audience of the Public's production had similar reactions to it as the one at Mount Holyoke. "Cutting through the fictions to get at the heart of a culture has left many in Mr. Wolfe's audience with mixed emotions, he admitted."⁷ Challenging race by using humor and driving home points does affect an audience harshly, which Wolfe saw clearly in his work.

Another issue that cropped up in reviews is that not all of the skits are equal to each other. However, none of the writers took any time to write down which of the skits were perceived as the weaker ones; although, they did point out (in all the reviews which covered this topic) that the exceptional cast and crew made up for the weaker sketches. It is interesting, in fact, that no review described the sketches in the production as "weaker" because, as they said, the "cast and crew saved the weaker scenes". Perhaps the script doesn't need to be saved, if after twenty years of performance it has not been lost (or, rather, no loss has been recorded).

While the play has been rejected on the grounds that it is racist, it has also been widely accepted as black American play. The fact that not all of the scenes represent "black problems", as one of the critics described, is not necessarily as popular as a complaint. This could be due to the fact that problems that are not specifically related to being black in America still affect black Americans. This could also be due to Wolfe's statement in 1995: "I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island' or 'Hamlet,' and look beyond the specifics of it -- whether it be silly white people on an island, or a family living in Nowheres, or a Danish person -- to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me. I'm interested: Is the reverse possible? Can people who are not of color leap past the specifics of who these people are and get inside the dynamic of who they are as individuals?"⁸ Wolfe was not interested in making a play that only applied to black Americans; instead, he wanted a play that presented some of the issues relating to black Americans and how some black Americans deal with those issues.

Looking at the range of views, it is easy to see that there are various modes of accepting and rejecting the play. Some people see it as anti-black, while others see it as a poorly written play that does not achieve its goal of a montage of scenes. The audience, upon leaving, generally contains people of mixed feelings. Whether or not they accept or reject the play is not clear, but it is plain to see that people are effected differently by this play. Some leave laughing while others leave with heaviness in their hands. This range of emotion can be accredited to the writing and style of the play, as well as the productions use of slides or other commentary devices.

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Footnotes
1. The Colored Museum to Run March 3-4
2. Kline, "In New Brunswick, A World Premiere"
3. Kline, "In New Brunswick, A World Premiere"
4. Holden, "Where the Laughs are: Comedy is King on City Stages"
5. Rich, "Satire by George C. Wolfe"
6. Rich, "Satire by George C. Wolfe"
7. Gerard, "Colored Museum is Author's Exorcism"
8. McNeil, "George Wolfe and His Theater of Inclusion"

For more information on these footnotes, please see the Critical Bibliography and the Contextual Bibliography.