The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe, Essay Example

George C. Wolfe’s satirical play, The Colored Museum, elicits emotion from those who read its powerful lines and see its cavalier sentiments spring to life on stage. The play is Wolfe’s indelicate way of handling sensitive subjects known well by the African American community. The play is composed of a double handful of vignettes that show Blacks reacting to the things that have weighed them down as baggage from a painful past. The universal thread in each short tale echoes the need for all African Americans to come to terms with where they have come from, where they are, and where they see themselves going as an involuntarily immigrated race and as individuals within a common, transplanted race. It is offensive without apology. It is scathing without pettiness. It is shocking without being searing. The play carries just enough humor to keep its audience captivated and just enough scalding stereotype to keep its audience from growing bored.

Three themes emerge strongly from The Colored Museum that helps its reader or viewer to redefine the meaning of Blackness in the 21^st century. First is the theme of racism that rises sharply in “Git on Board.” Second is the theme of social recognition most evident in the piece entitled “The Gospel According to Miss Roj.” Third is the theme of class distinction as evidenced in “Symbiosis,” a monologue (almost) that favors the erasure of memory over erecting monuments to it. All three of these themes, intolerance, respect, and grouping are commonly bound by satire that attempts to cover the stinging pain of the story of Black America with smiles, laughter, and amnesia; but, if we are honest, we know that we make jokes about the things that are most important to us. Wolfe uses these little stories, lampooning them all the way through, to remind us that whenever we cry, we can rest assured that there is a brighter tomorrow, and when we laugh, we can be certain that we will never be totally estranged from suffering.

The particular aspect of colored life that is germane to each of these themes is the fact that the contemporary experiences of African Americans, who have experienced life success because of education, business, and other professional pursuits, may cause many of them to forget the heritage that is theirs from their native continent. Wolfe, in this play, warns that there is a danger in forgetting or ignoring the story of struggle that is common to most all Black Americans.

In “Git on Board,” a solitary, female actor, “Miss Pat,” is dressed as a flight attendant for an airline. She addresses her audience just as she would do during a pre-flight instructional session. She goes about her job with a perky countenance. She gives a brief review of the history of the United States history. She provides keys that unlock how Blacks have witnessed and shaped the American story. Soon the reader or viewer knows that her vessel is not a cruise ship or an airplane. Her audience is a group of slaves, and she is a part of the crew that is taking them as an enslaved people to a new and strange land from which there will be no escape. She admonishes her “guests” to refrain from call and response singing and playing drums. She takes pleasure in telling her captives that even though they will give up their religion and work under scorching heat, basketball will one day make them rich. She reassures them that it will take civil rights martyrs to bring them closer to having equality. At the end of their journey toward the slave-trading center of Savannah, Georgia, her cargo is portrayed, not as human beings, but as suitcases –property, not fully human. Miss Pat reminds us of the inherent racism that comes from treating others as objects without souls. “If you have any trouble bonding yourself,” Miss Pat gleefully says in her perfectly enunciated English, “I’ll be more than glad to assist.”

In “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” a solitary male actor, dressed as a woman, is on stage in a nightclub, as she performs her comedy routine. The name of the club is “The Bottomless Pit,” an obvious reference to Hell. “All my demons reside at the bottom of my Bicardi and Coke,” Roj admits. Roj sets herself up as an extraterrestrial that has come to earth to point out the flaws of a degenerating society. The flashing lights of the club are signals to Roj from her home planet. Miss Roj, the drag queen, declares that truth must come out, and when it does, it must be accompanied by the snap of the fingers. “If this place is the answer,” Miss Roj shouts, “then we’re asking all the wrong questions.” As part philosopher, part doomsday naysayer, Roj places a curse on her audience that they will never be able to hear the snap of fingers without remembering her and her power, even though she and her co-aliens have traded in their drums for respectability. The finger snap is a metaphor for the crack of the whip that once thrashed against the backs of American slaves. Every pop of the whip reminded their senses of sight, sound, touch that they were under total subjection. Even their sense of taste, knowing well the taste of blood, knew the significance of the whip placed upon them. Miss Roj’s snaps are imitations of the lashes of the whip, and her habitual snapping is her way of hitting back at injustice. Wherever she finds it, she wants to strike out at it in order to eradicate it. Social recognition is a thing that Roj needs. She speaks to a room full of people, not quite that they are really even listening to her. She wants to be noticed for who she is. She wants to find acceptance for who she is. She wants others to understand that she is marginalized because of her race, her sexuality, and her addictions to the point of no return.

In “Symbiosis,” a solitary make actor (and his inner child, played by a younger male actor) throws away his first pair of Converse All-Star athletic shoes, his first Afro comb, his first African heritage shirt, his autographed pictures of the Black celebrities of his youth, his palmade, his Afrosheen, his curl relaxer, his Eldridge Cleaver book, Soul on Ice (replaced on his bookshelf with, The Color Purple), and his Jimi Hendrix recording of “Purple Haze,” all in order to achieve a class distinction that he feels he must have in order to thrive in the United States as a part of the dominant middle class of mainstream, main street America. The actor wants to rid himself of all of the things that connect him to who he once was as a young Black man. He is convinced that his survival as an up and coming man of prominence depends on his ability to disassociate himself from his ethnic sensitivities. He does not wish to be what he calls a “sociological dinosaur,” meaning, he wants to adjust with the times, and the times do not have time or patience for tales about how his people came over or how his people overcame. He wants to continue his upward climb in economic and social prominence by calling no attention to his struggle, so he reassures himself that he has no history and that he has no past. With all of his might, he tries to shake his past, but the harder he tries to erase it, the more his inner child, the boy he once was, reproaches him. He believes that he has killed his own rage, but he learns that his heritage is a thing that will never, ever release him, so he vows to continue to be Black, but “only on weekends and holidays.” What a sardonic tale.

Miss Pat wants the Blacks to survive so they can give William Faulkner inspiration for his future novels (Richardson). Miss Roj reminds us that not everyone can write a comedy sketch that evokes postmodern laughter and get away with it (Gates). The symbiotic man deftly parodies Black realism as he filters through his prism of rage (Gerard). In collecting scattered fragments, Wolfe causes Whites as well as Blacks to examine the things they have collected and assimilated from our schizoid culture as they have constructed their lives.

A deep analysis of selected lines from the three vignettes chosen for analysis here suggest that African Americans who look at life in the present and for the future, forgoing notice of their past cultural heritage from Africa, omit an essential task that will make them more human and real. This is the specific aspect of Colored life that is underscored in Wolfe’s play. Miss Pat’s request, “we ask that you refrain from call and response singing between cabins, as that sort of thing can lead to rebellion,” hints that Africans who fail to communicate with other African Americans about matters important to them as a race of people are doomed to be subjected to lead subservient lives. Miss Roj says it plainly, this business about not dealing with the reality that accompanies the story of race as it unfolds. “I am not just your regular, oppressed American negro,” she says. “I am an extra terrestrial…I have real power.” This is her admonition to all people within her race that they need to remember the past so it can inform their decisions in the here and now. In spite of her occupation as one who would not be taken seriously by society, she speaks prophetically. The actor, Johnny, in “Symbiosis” is so named because that name os so common and ordinary. He might as well be nameless, because he represents every man who shares the color of his skin. He throws away his Jackson 5 album with the song “I Want You

Back.” His inner child, played by another actor, confronts him with the words, “No, you can’t throw that away. Man, it’s living proof Michael had a black nose.” Again, this is the younger man’s voice telling him that he is about to deny his heritage, and by so doing, abandon his identity as a Black man.

In closing, each of the brief scenes in Wolfe’s play resonates with the themes expounded on here. The Colored experience is one that is rich with history. African Americans have overcome much to get equal treatment in this country. Some would argue that the treatment of Blacks is not yet equal. Wolfe takes the stance that equality can never happen when there is denial of the things that happened yesterday or disrespect for the things that occur right now. Without these acknowledgements, tomorrow might witness repeats of previous racial and societal missteps.

Works Cited

Gates, Anita. “More Than a Museum Piece.” New York Times 05 October (2008).

Gerard, Jeremy. (1986). “’Colored Museum’ is Author’s Exorcism.” New York Times 06 November 1986.

Richardson, Alice (1998). “George Wolfe’s Play, ‘The Colored Museum,’ is a Treasury of Laughs.” New York Amsterdam News 10591818, 22 October, 89, 43.