‘Colored Museum’ Star Likes Having Last Laugh

Seraiah Carol, one of the core five-person ensemble in the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s “The Colored Museum,” was born in what she calls “the colored wing” of a Chicago hospital.

Only last year, her 73-year-old mother, who was briefly hospitalized and released, told her daughter that she had finally made it to what had once exclusively been the white people’s section. “She said, ‘I have arrived!’ ” Carol said with a rueful laugh.

It’s also been quite a journey for Carol herself, whose first role was the impassioned Mama in a high school production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and who now takes on that very role for laughs in George C. Wolfe’s sendup of black stereotypes in “The Colored Museum,” playing through Sept. 3.

“The Last Mama on the Couch Play” is one vignette, among many, that comes out on the revolving stage as a frozen statue, comes to life and freezes again before exiting. Wasn’t it a little difficult for Carol to make fun of the work of Lorraine Hansberry, the black playwright, whose work inspired her to take up acting as a career?

“I have no sacred cows,” Carol said. “I howled when I read the script. Because it’s true. And I was raised to value the truth.

“Mr. Wolfe is getting people to laugh at themselves and black people are learning it’s OK to laugh. White people are learning it’s OK to laugh. The thing I get from ‘The Last Mama on the Couch Play’ is that blacks have had to exceed everyone in strength and stamina, and he (Wolfe) is saying all we have to do is exist and be.”

Still, she acknowledges, some jokes do touch raw nerves.

She recalls one actress she knows who protested Martin Luther King Jr.’s name being written on the back of swishing hand fans at

the Rep. The name stayed. And she acknowledges that it was hard for her to do the role of Aunt Ethel--a combination of Aunt Jemima and a witch doctor--in blackface as she had to do in the Denver production of the play.

“That was hurtful for me,” she said. “In this country, white folks were putting on blackface (to play blacks). So, in order to work, blacks had to so the same thing. To cover up our skin with more black to perform, that’s a hard pill to swallow.”

Eventually, however, Carol said, the director’s choice proved therapeutic.

“I learned that I didn’t need to hold on to the hurt anymore. Just acting it out got me through it.”

The desire to act also gets her through a lot of rejection by directors who look for white actors when they send out general casting calls for all actors. Sometimes, the giveaway that they are looking for “whites only” is that they advertise for “a Roman type or an Irish type,” Carol said. But Carol will even disregard that.

“Maybe they thought they wanted to use one type of person, but once they see me and see the effect I have on them, then they’ll have a different idea. Sometimes you get there, and there’s no way they’ll put you in the show and they say, ‘You’re wasting our time,’ or ‘Oh, I wish. . . .’--I’ve gotten that.

“But I’m not afraid to answer the general calls. I’ll go out for everything. When I was born, they said, ‘It’s a girl,’ not ‘It’s a black girl.’ ”

Carol said she’s gotten used to rejection and doesn’t let it faze her.

“I’m very persistent,” she said. “And, coming from my type of background, things don’t hurt as much. Chicago was very, very prejudiced.”

Carol moved from Chicago to New York to Los Angeles in search of work and found out that Hollywood, because of its emphasis on physical appearance, wasn’t much better for a black woman who wanted to act. She still makes her home in Los Angeles, but it is San Diego that she credits for most of her breaks. She sold her car in New York to get to Los Angeles in 1985 and didn’t find work for a whole year.

Then in September, 1986, she spontaneously took a break from her Super Shuttle job, driving people to and from LAX Airport, to audition for “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” at the Lawrence Welk Dinner Theatre. She showed up in her black-and-white Super Shuttle uniform without music or pictures, but on the bus she recalled the words to her favorite song, “Mean to Me.”

One callback later, she got the part.

Good reviews at the Welk landed her an agent and subsequent jobs, including a Coca-Cola commercial, a Soft and Pretty toilet paper commercial and a small part in “Contract on Cherry Street,” a television movie in which she got to play a scene opposite Frank Sinatra.

“He was nice,” she remembers with a smile. “And I’m still getting residuals.”

But the parts soon ran out. She found that most shows were all white, like “The Wizard of Oz,” or all black, like “The Wiz.”’ And then there were the shows in which she found herself to be the only black in the company, possibly, she says, because she was the only black who applied for roles where others just assumed blacks weren’t wanted.

The reality of the situation, though, was that, in most cases, blacks haven’t been wanted, she says.

“You may be good, but the audiences are middle-aged whites and they only want to see one type of person. And nobody wants to lose their business. What seems to be happening is that directors of the theaters are trying to gain the confidence of the audiences so that they can introduce new things. It takes time for things to happen.”

In 1987, Carol saw an advertisement in Dramalogue for “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know” at the San Diego Rep.

“The Rep was like a light at the end of the tunnel. Usually when blacks are wanted they say, ‘Minorities encouraged.’ But the ad just said ‘six funny women’ and I said to myself, ‘I’m funny.’ ”

She found out that, when the Rep advertised for “six funny women,” that is exactly what it meant.

Carol became the first black woman to play in a production of “Six Women,” which opened in October at the Lyceum Space and is still running at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse. She left that show when she was offered “The Colored Museum” at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

When she opened in Denver, she sent the Rep the glowing reviews from “The Colored Museum.” Although Sam Woodhouse, the producing director of the Rep, won’t say whether that influenced the Rep’s decision to put the show on the schedule, it certainly did remind him that Carol would be a good person to audition for it.

She is now playing the same roles at the Rep that she played in Denver: the Mama on the couch, Aunt Ethel, a maid, a wildly dancing Topsy Washington and an Afro-wig who insists on being worn by the vacillating woman who owns her.

It’s the kind of play that improves with repetition, both for the performer and the audience, she says.

“Over a period of time, you sense more of what the author is trying to say. This particular show says so much you can’t get it all in the first sitting. You sometimes wish the critics would come after a month of performances. You evolve into something much more creative.

“I think one of the things Mr. Wolfe is saying is it’s OK to be you. You stand up on your own two feet. You learn to listen to your insides. Everyone was looking for leaders; now you have to listen deeper. If you can laugh at something, and it doesn’t hurt anymore, you can move ahead.”