STAGE : Two Trips Through ‘The Colored Museum’ : More Apologies for Racism

George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” moves from the Mark Taper Forum to the Westwood Playhouse on June 18. The show has drawn crowds and comment at the Taper for its satirical treatment of black stereotypes. Below, two black women go on record about the show. Times staff writer Itabari Njeri found it a step forward. Actress Frances Williams, who has been involved with black theater for 70 years, found it a step backward.

America’s cultural crisis, precipitated by the impermanence of urban industrial advance, has left everyone looking for “roots.” It is ironic that the crisis has left many black Americans rejecting theirs.

Or so it seems at “The Colored Museum,” George Wolfe’s play at the Mark Taper Forum. Though we are drawn into the play by the impressive style and technical skill of presentation, the beautiful costumes and wonderful acting, the message is unsettling. While the writer may have intended satire--a hard and critical look at the personal choices forced on “the Negro” in America to assure success--he has actually reiterated America’s confusion.

The irony is that while critics suggest that the play is “about being black,” they also acknowledge that the author refuses to define it. “Too limiting,” he says . (The Times, May 6, 1988).

The play’s 11 sketches do, however, give it a definition, albeit a confusing and contradictory one. Of course, this is the author’s point and we are inclined to agree. Life in America does impose contradictions for everyone, black and white.

However, Wolfe forces the problem inside: The source of the contradiction becomes black people, who seem to have accepted these stereotypes along with whites. The author’s characters, LaLa, Miss Roj, the Black Yuppie, the Ebony models, the arguing wigs, leave us with the film of self-hate that results from their cultural schizophrenia. (The portrait of the soldier, the woman-child giving birth to an egg, and “Mama” are much more insidious.)

But the images in conflict in the play are all products of white-dominated American society. Sadly, the author is not satirizing black life, but rather society’s portrayal of black life--which is a caricature. Whenever blacks have assumed positions of perceived power, that is, any assumption of autonomously defined images of self, they have been demonized by society. The alarm is sounded that blacks must be contained lest they abuse whites with their new sense of self.

In the end the only acceptable identification is that of assimilation. Therefore, by a denial of cultural clarity and failure to identify the problems resulting from racism, Wolfe extols the virtues of assimilation. The author assumes that we will all, black and white, leave the theater with a universal understanding. Sadly we depart more confirmed in the stereotypes that have plagued our past.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this problem (the problem of cultural confusion and failure to understand the consequences of racism). White America has always encouraged assimilation, not simply among blacks but of all ethnic groups. Cultural variables, particularly race and ethnicity, while acknowledged, have only been treated as factors to be overcome, as the source of conflict in society.

The fear of cultural autonomy may be well founded because in fact it has been the source of strength and, yes, at times the basis for revolt, as with the Irish mine workers, the Molly Maguires, the Polish steel workers in Pennsylvania, the Jewish women in New York who rioted against high food prices in the early 1900s.

When Wolfe’s play opens and Miss Pat, our tour guide, warns us the “drums will not be tolerated,” “ignore the drums,” we are hopeful that the metaphor will be used to present the dilemma of cultural continuity versus the workaday world of conformity.

Instead, the author moves us directly into America’s caricature of black womanhood in the early part of the century: Aunt Jemima, Wolfe’s “Aunt Ethel.” His enshrinement of this caricature in the museum could not provoke my laughter. My own career was delayed by a consistent refusal of every bandanna handed to me in the production of “Show Boat” in the 1940s. I find little change today. White America is not humiliated by this image of its creation. Now it only blames Aunt Ethel.

The real dilemma of “The Colored Museum” is that the writer seems to find no cultural authenticity in the black American past. The author may recognize that America has caricatured what it could not co-opt, but this does not come across in the play.

My concern here is not exclusively with “The Colored Museum” as theater. It is with the advanced stage of cultural confusion which plagues America and manifests itself in the arts.

Culture is the result of the process of adjustment to reality. It changes, it is functional. While language, style, tradition etc. may be symbols of culture they are not themselves culture. We cannot characterize culture as good or bad. We can only understand its dynamic by identifying its usefulness to a group in adjusting to the problems of survival and alienation.

Without recognizing the function of legitimate cultural archetypes which have emerged from the experience of a people (for example, “strong black mothers”) we are destined to dismiss and ridicule all such archetypes because the struggle to maintain cultural authenticity becomes confused with political struggles.

Black people must never allow their fight for clarity and authenticity to be misunderstood by having it characterized as a political struggle. They are two separate matters.

This is the problem the author experiences in “Symbiosis,” the scene centering on the conflict between “The Man” and “The Kid.” Clarity can only emerge if we understand that all societies exercise control and domination through instruments of culture. Therefore, the dominant groups’ life style becomes the ideal which other groups are forced to emulate.

It is important to end this discussion on a historical note. W.E.B. DuBois in a speech in 1926 (“Criteria for Negro Art”) found it necessary to address the young artists of the day and to remind them that they were on the cutting edge of society’s demand for conformity and control whether they wanted or intended such a function or not. He said:

. . . the white public today demands from its artists, literary and pictorial, racial pre-judgment which deliberately distorts Truth and Justice, as far as the colored races are concerned, and it will pay for no other.

. . . there are today a surprising number of white people who are getting great satisfaction out of these younger Negro writers because they think it is going to stop agitation of the Negro question. They say, ‘What is the use of your fighting and complaining; do the great thing and the reward is there.’ And many colored people are all too eager to follow this advice; especially those who are weary of the eternal struggle along the color line, who are afraid to fight and to whom the money of philanthropists and the alluring publicity are subtle and deadly bribes. They say ‘What is the use of fighting? Why not show simply what we deserve and let the reward come to us?’

The message is equally appropriate today.