TV Reviews : ‘Colored Museum’ Explodes Racial Stereotypes

“The Colored Museum,” the stage hit of a few seasons back that hurled exploding darts into black icons and black stereotypes, premieres on television tonight (on “Great Performances” at 9 on Channels 15 and 24, at 9:30 on Channel 28).

Theater, because it’s a less public and thus safer haven for dramatic experiment, is more free than television to explore daring, unsettling, potentially offensive and controversial material. The fact that television has caught up to “The Colored Museum” is good news, because a lot of unsuspecting viewers--blacks and others--are going to have stereotypes turned upside down with the 10 “exhibits” unfurled in this museum.

The production stars the same cast that staged the show at the New York Public Theatre and which subsequently packed the Mark Taper Forum and Westwood Playhouse in 1988. The TV program has also added some performers, notably Linda Hopkins belting out “Cookin’ With Aunt Ethel” in a hilarious parody of an Aunt Jemima character.

George C. Wolfe’s blistering series of vignettes are ripe, stinging parodies of knee-jerk stereotyping among blacks, from “dyed, fried and chemicalized” hairstyles to a delicious send-up of Ebony magazine. There’s even a takeoff on fat-mama plays and “Raisin in the Sun,” of all revered things--and Lorraine Hansberry would probably be the first to get the joke.

In a clever touch, the show deceptively opens at a chic cocktail party where upscale blacks and whites mingle in glowy harmony. That complacency is followed by the first stereotype and slap of reality: a camcorder visit to Celebrity Slaveship, a little time travel, if you please, from darkest Africa to America.

A fluffed up, ebullient airline stewardess (Danitra Vance) tells her black passengers that drums are not allowed on the plane and tries to lead a sing-along with “Git on Board.” But whites falter at the words. Gershwin’s “Summertime” they know. Cut to graphics of historical prints of manacled slaves on 18th-Century sailing ships and ultimately a chained slave spinning slowly around the mobile baggage rack at Kennedy Airport. Point made.

The show never exploits its subject but, in the best tradition of satire, deflates racial myths and misconceptions. At bottom, Wolfe, a black Kentuckian, is dealing with the outsider in society, with surface deceptions, like that Aunt Jemima character. She’s not simply the butt of a joke about colored cuisine but really a reminder of the texture of sharecropper life if, as the show asks, whites in this case can get beyond their “Gone With the Wind” conditioning, memories of pancakes, or whatever the stereotypes are.

As television, “The Colored Museum” is overdue.