STAGE REVIEW : ‘Colored Museum’ Full of Savvy Sketches

Some blacks get nervous watching George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum.” Some whites, too.

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The talk got a little itchy during a recent intermission at Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre. A stylish black woman sighed to her stylish white companion that “I’m not sure about all of this . . . the images cut a little close.” He nodded sympathetically, “I’m not sure if it’s OK to laugh at certain things.”

Aw, go ahead, Wolfe prefers it that way. “The Colored Museum,” which had a successful run at the Mark Taper Forum and the Westwood Playhouse in 1988, is shaped for laughter, and molded to provoke discussion later.

Wolfe, whose “Jelly’s Last Jam” about the contradictory life of jazzman Jelly Roll Morton is currently one of the brashest rides on Broadway, offers his slant on various corners of the “black experience” in 11 vignettes, most of them revealing and punchy.

A couple are a little full of themselves, and at least one may be baffling--a surreal number about a girl and the giant egg she’s hatching is based on a whimsical African folk tale, but there’s no explanation in the program. Another weakness is that Wolfe approaches black rage only tangentially. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, the vagueness seems particularly obvious.

Still, Wolfe’s best reflections go beyond the familiar and probe for a personal truth, especially when they prod or mightily elbow aside stereotypes and cliches. In Long Beach, Jim Goins’ provocative staging is savvy to all that.

The drawbacks seem to be economics: Despite a smoothly revolving stage, Phil Lubman’s minimal sets are constructed on the cheap. Actors look as if they brought their own props; in one scene, a soldier deep in a Vietnam jungle appears to be carrying a BB gun.

The thrift store veneer, however, doesn’t intrude on the capable cast, which includes two white actors (Shelley Pabst and Brad Larimore) in black face for the sketch spoofing Ebony magazine.

The mugging by Jason E. Carmichael, Jackie Cressel-Gichohi, Simone Stephens, Wendy Raquel Robinson and Larimore is monumental in “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” only adding to its satirical swipe at Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.”

In an earlier sketch, “Cookin’ With Aunt Ethel,” Deborah Kellar parodies Aunt Jemima brewing up “a batch of Negroes.” She happily tosses in all sorts of ingredients, including a “little attitude . . . whoops, put in too much!”

The evening’s best performance may come from Ken Elliott in “The Gospel According to Miss Roj.” As Miss Roj, Elliott explains what it must be like to be both black and gay (“not your regular oppressed Negro”) in ways that are at once angry and tragic.

“The Colored Museum,” Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theatre, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach. Fridays - Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinee Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 29. $9-$10; (310) 494-1616.