When George C. Wolfe submitted The Colored Museum to the national playwriting contest run by Crossroads Theatre Company, a legacy Black theatre in New Brunswick NJ, he knew that he was entering tricky cultural territory. His play takes a direct look at the costs of the kind of assimilation strategies that many Black middle-class theatergoers attributed their safety and cultural power to. It satirized Ebony Magazine, respectability politics, A Raisin in the Sun, and Black Broadway musicals.
If The Colored Museum was poised to upset Black audiences, it also asked its all-Black cast to embody painful histories of enslavement, minstrel performance, and the cost of hollowed-out assimilation in front of white audience members who would likely lack context on the vibrancy and resilience of the culture forged from these painful experiences and traditions.
But this collision of themes and audiences was and remains at the core Wolfe’s aim with the play. As he said in a 1986 interview during the New York run of the show:
“In many respects, the central character of [The Colored Museum] is the audience. At each performance, some people come out laughing, others crying. The other night, someone said to me, ‘This is too painful to go through.’ But I believe that wounds heal better in open air. The best houses are half-Black and half-white. There's a dangerous tension that has to resolve itself in laughter.”
Wolfe never quite tells the audience what he—and by extension Black America—might find on the other side of this tension, but in a prelude to The Colored Museum that ran with the original script, he wrote:
“Somebody has chopped up pieces of my pain and put it on display against white walls and the wrong kind of light, so that when I go searching for my reflection, the scattered images make me feel incomplete. But if I can learn to love my contradictions and discover that there’s freedom inside the pain and madness, then soon I will discover that these scattered images together form a picture full of power and magic, and this power and magic is alive inside of me.”
—Adrien-Alice Hansel