Cuts, Bruises and Belly Laughs in ‘Colored Museum’ : Skewering Slavery, Archetypical Mammies and Smug Assimilation

Watching George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” at the Westwood Playhouse can be a hilarious, wrenching, eye-opening experience. So can performing in it.

“Every point in the play is about pain--which is something we don’t like to talk about,” said Tommy Hollis, who, like most of the six-member cast, has been with show for two years (including runs in New York, London and, locally, at the Mark Taper Forum). “The first time I read ‘Miss Roj,’ I couldn’t believe someone was daring to talk that way about a drag queen. When I read ‘LaLa,’ I was holding my gut, saying, ‘This is sad, sad, sad--but it’s also funny.’ ”

“When I got the script, I was running around saying, ‘Can you believe this?, “ echoed Loretta Devine, during a recent cast interview at the Playhouse. “I couldn’t believe his language. I couldn’t believe the things he was talking about. And the profanity! Everything else you see with black people is about their relationship with the white man. This play isn’t about that.” Referring to whites, she said, “It was important to George that y’all aren’t necessarily mentioned.”

Instead, Wolfe’s turf is a series of vignettes, which skewer slavery, black soldiers, archetypical mammies, smugly assimilated black businessmen, Ebony magazine models, preteen mothers and “Raisin in the Sun”-type expressions of black family life.

“Theater didn’t have that voice before George,” said Hollis. “Just now we’re getting Robert Townsend and Spike Lee doing it on film. It’s a way of looking at something with a new point of view.”

Which is necessarily angry? “Which is necessarily painful,” Hollis said. “Our show starts with the metal passage: You see the slave ships and people’s bodies. White people want us to forget about that and put it out of their history--and black people don’t want to conjure it up either. But our show starts with that pain. Then the first thing you see is a stewardess in a pink miniskirt saying, ‘Put on your shackles. Git on board. ‘ “

The material does tend to provoke a love-it-or-hate-it response. “There’s no in-between,” said Reggie Montgomery. “I used to be offended when I’d see people walking out during ‘Miss Roj.’ You almost want to ad-lib lines: ‘That’s right. You’re scared, copping out. Go on. Run. Leave.’ But you can’t drum a message into anybody if you have to tie them up to hear it.”

Vickilyn Reynolds has no problem with audience antipathy. “It makes me happy,” she said militantly. “Sometimes I read it like if they’re not smiling, they’re getting the underneath message. But I also have a lot of rage in me, so at the end when I say, ‘I just go on about the business of being me,’ it makes me feel so good to say that out loud, to look into those faces that have been staring at me like I got something all over me. . . .”

The disapproval isn’t limited to whites. “A lot of blacks think these are things not to be discussed,” said Devine. “It’s like we’re telling their secrets.” She refers to the segment in which two wigs (“long tresses” and Afro) battle it out over which one their mistress will wear to lunch.

“We get a lot of those conservative Republican blacks coming in,” added Hollis, “and when I say, ‘I watch the news with an impersonal eye; I have no stake in the events of the world’--they’re seething. They don’t want to hear it. I used to think it was a problem. But George said, ‘No, it’s working on them; it’s burning the hell out of them.’ ”

For the cast, however, this has been an exercise in self-acceptance. “The line that sticks out most for me,” said Violette Winge, is: “Everything I need to get on in this world is inside,” meaning inside oneself. For percussionist and cast member Ron McBee, “It’s about not letting people define you, not living with those definitions. I think the play is a process that allows you to see things, go through them--and then come out the other side.”

The process can be rigorous for the performers, too. “It’s a real commitment--not only to each other but to the show,” said Montgomery. “Especially those times when I don’t feel like coming on at all: It’s like a one-night stand, and you’re not quite sure you want to take your clothes off. Because we’re totally disrobing out there.”

They’ve all been warmed by the local response--first at the Taper, but especially with the more diverse audiences at the Westwood. Said McBee, “The Taper crowd was more what they call blue hairs; here it’s been more racially mixed.”

As for the controversy, “My aunt used to say, ‘If you’re talked about, you’re important. If they don’t know where you are, you’re nobody,” Hollis said. “So even if people come for the wrong reason--to be socially correct--it still gets them thinking. The end of the play says, ‘We’re fabulous.’ George wants that to be in the message. Because it’s not all about rage. Nobody’s walking around raging.”

“I am,” Reynolds countered. “Especially in New York. It’s better here.” She recalls the high of performing and audience ovations, then stepping outside the theater and not being able to get a cab. “There’s a line in the play, ‘Being black is too emotionally taxing’--and it is. Besides being black and a woman, I’m a dark-skinned black.”

Whatever their personal demons, the group support is easily perceived. “I am entertained by this piece,” Hollis said. “And I get a charge out of these performers, being on stage with them. Every time I come off for the slave (piece), Vicki and I embrace. Then, every night after ‘LaLa,’ Loretta is in my dressing room, and we share the time talking--about nothing or something. I love these people, and I love what they’re doing.”

Which isn’t, they maintain, either a black history lesson or a cure-all for society’s ills. “This play does not answer all black problems, all black life,” Hollis said. “It is only a slice of black life.”

Devine added, “What we say in the play is not important to all black people; it may be important to some white people. I mean, these are American problems. The wig scene applies to something a lot of women go through in a society that demands so much--where what you’re given naturally isn’t good enough. The play speaks to everybody. It’s not just a black thing. It is an American kind of thing.”