STAGE : Two Trips Through ‘The Colored Museum’ : Black Not Like Me

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.

OK, here comes a once upon a time that’s real.

Once upon it, I was 12 and sang. I was 12, black and sang. What did I sing? Come on. Give it up. You know what you think I sang.

I always sang. (That fits.) On the stoop outside our Brooklyn brownstone I’d throw my head back and entertain the whole block with “The wayward wind, is a restless wind, a restless wind, that yearns to wander. . . .”

See, I knew the 1956 Hit Parade by heart. A fact that did not always please my grandmother. She’d stick her head out the second-story brownstone window and, in her imperious Jamaican accent, demand to know, “Whaat”--saliva flew out her mouth when she spit out the t --”do you think you know about a wayward wind, child? You too forward.” That meant I was too grown for my age. “You such a arrogant t’ing. Come, come up here now.”

When I came upstairs, the music playing on my mother’s favorite radio station was “Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by . . . .” Or songs like that.

When I was 8 and moved to Harlem, I heard Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips” blasting from the speakers outside the Apollo Theatre and I became a Motown junkie, so discerning I knew Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were the real fudge while the Supremes were only vanilla. Even so, my musical tastes were never ghettoized. My idol, through my early adolescent years was Leontyne Price. I too was a soprano, better yet, a spinto like Price. We had the range of a coloratura combined with the power and tonal quality of a dramatic soprano.

With this voice, I entered one of the best junior high schools in New York, Castle Hill in the Bronx. I was one of a few black students who integrated the school through open enrollment, New York City’s version of busing. Because I lived in Brooklyn, it took an hour-and-a-half subway ride to get to school. And if I was to make 8 a.m. chorus rehearsal, I had to leave home by 6:30 a.m.

Did Castle Hill love me? If I could have half the money I raised for that school doing musical concerts, my tuition to college and graduate school could have been paid for without loans.

So, once upon a weekday afternoon at Castle Hill, I had just finished singing that Spanish war horse, “Granada,” for Mr. Feinauer, a very tall, very bald, very red-faced music teacher. He was just knocked out by the maturity of my 12-year-old voice. Tinkling the ivories he said, “Sing ‘Stormy Weather’ for me.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know ‘Stormy Weather.’ ” Mr. Feinauer was crestfallen, but not beaten. At my first public concert at Castle Hill he arranged for me to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Since my mother was a disaffected Roman Catholic and my father a Marxist, my early knowledge of spirituals was from song and history books. When I told this to the black music teacher on the faculty, she looked at me quizzically and said: “Well, you’re not like any Negroes I know.”

But everybody was happy when I sang “Summertime.” To their minds, it was the perfect melding of voice, song and race. As all black sopranos know, or will be reminded, “Summertime” is a tune for all seasons.

In George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum”--an examination and parody of black American cultural myths and stereotypes--Danitra Vance steps forward and demands the audience sing “Git on Board.” They falter. The audience is mostly white, their firsthand knowledge of spirituals slim.

But when she gets them started on “Summertime,” the audience practically takes over the show. The great Gershwin’s transmutation of black material is more accessible. The sheer beauty of the music is certainly one reason, but no one conveyed it better than all those great black sopranos, their voices a musical caress. I’m telling you, this Mark Taper crowd was getting off. Just as my music teacher was prepared to if I’d sung “Stormy Weather.” Oooh, what Lena Horne had done to him even a 12-year-old colored girl should be prepared to do.

You think I’ve got the mentality assessed incorrectly? Wait.

When playwright Wolfe aims his dagger-sharp pen at black theatrical stereotypes, it is hilarious, illuminating satire. Each sketch in “The Colored Museum” is an exhibit and one, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” parodies “A Raisin in the Sun” “For Colored Girls. . .” and all those black musicals too numerous to mention.

Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie-Jones is a scenery-chewing black man who wants The Man to get off his back. The Man is on his back so bad Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie can hardly walk for trying to shake off this leech-like but invisible presence sucking the life of him, out of all the black men in America. Walter-etc., is a moaner with 400 hundred years of oppression on his back.

But his Mama--the last Mama on the couch--doesn’t want to hear it, at least not until Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie-Jones wipes his feet. She’s a God-fearing Christian woman and no son of hers--white man on his back or not--is going come into her house without first wiping his feet.

But when Mama lightens up and tells the mostly white, Sunday matinee crowd “too bad this isn’t a black musical,” ’cause in black musicals no one is ever unhappy or dies, she was talking about the theatrical drug of choice.

Mama rips off her housedress, shakes her lame-swathed, silver-spangled girth a la Nell Carter and leads the cast in a hand-clapping, high-stepping musical number. The audience doesn’t miss a beat; they’re clapping and swaying with real enthusiasm. They are in minstrel heaven. The incredibly talented cast of players hadn’t gotten so overwhelming a response all evening, and there was much to respond to.

Stereotypes are what you use to define a person, not to mention a people, in the absence of real knowledge and understanding. The myth had become reality--for a lot of black people too. Remember the black teacher who said I was like no Negro she had known because I wasn’t raised on spirituals?

A very thoughtful black man, not quick to make judgments, asked several days after the show, “There was so much audience participation in that number, do you think it was because they didn’t get it?”

As the Kingfish would say, “What we gonna do now, Andy?”