George C. Wolfe wrote The Colored Museum to exorcise Black America’s cultural baggage. He was 31 years old when the play won a national playwriting competition through Crossroads Theatre, a legacy Black theater in New Brunswick, NJ whose mission is to “celebrate the culture, artistry, and voices of the African Diaspora.” After its run at Crossroads, the production transferred to The Public Theater in New York, where it ran for nearly two hundred performances, and then toured to The Royal Court Theatre in London.
Wolfe called the play “an exorcism and a party,” elaborating that “a lot of our identity as Black Americans has to do with choosing this or that from our schizoid culture,” a culture that demands that Black Americans conform to a narrow set of expectations, largely dictated by mainstream white culture—to be ‘political’ or ‘respectable’, or ‘artistic.’ “In order to get on with my life as an artist,” Wolfe continues, “I must be able to collect all those scattered fragments; the only way to get to the magic and the pathos and the mythology of the culture was by killing off the externals and getting underneath.”
His strategy was to power through those externals—the artefacts of Black history in the United States, including beloved cultural touchstones and worn-out stereotypes alike—by putting them on stage and subjecting them to a satirist’s scrutiny. “I became very interested in trying to reexamine the mythology of African American culture,” Wolfe has said, “and also trying to appropriate or trying to reclaim certain of the silhouettes; the silhouette of the trickster, the silhouette which some people would call the ‘coon,’ the silhouette of the ‘mammy’… I want to remove these dead stale, empty icons standing in the doorway, blocking me from my truth.” Or as he framed the central question of the play: “What portion of the past suffocates you and what portion of the past heals you?”
The exhibits in his “Colored Museum” propose a range of perspectives on the past and future. Some sketches take a caustic look at the brutality of enslavement—and the impulse to ignore its horrors to focus on the talented tenth who would transmute suffering into artistic expression. Other exhibits serve as cautionary tales about the safety, pleasures, and dangers of assimilation. Wolfe also offers a constellation of figures who have resisted the pressure to flatten out their cultural inheritance into a single version of their story, who celebrate what Wolfe characterizes as their “cultural madness.”
This cultural madness offers a tonic to what he calls America’s “schizoid culture,” one that pressures Black Americans to conform to a narrow set of expectations, largely dictated by mainstream white culture—political or respectable or artistic. This madness allows for a more hybrid take on identity, one that allows contradictions to live next to each other—a strategy echoed in the rapid-fire shifts of tone and content from exhibit to exhibit in The Colored Museum. “Smashing things together—that’s America at its most interesting,” Wolfe says. “It’s things connected, awkwardly, that produces the brilliance. It’s not absoluteness; it’s when things that don’t belong together collide, and in that collision, something springs forth.”
Ultimately, Wolfe suggests, the balance of past and present, madness and lucidity will shift for every Black American trying to forge a sense of self that fits them in particular. “It’s incredibly tricky,” Wolfe says, “exploring that complicated combination between power and pain and brilliance that it seems to me a sort of extraordinary triad that is African American culture: I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain but I can’t live without it.”
—Adrien-Alice Hansel