Miss Pat, the perky flight attendant who sets up the time-warp-y action in George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” reminds us that we must wear our shackles at all times during the flight. And please refrain from call and response between cabins because it could lead to rebellion.
Welcome to the middle passage. As portrayed by this postmodern ironist, it happens not on slave ships but on a trans-Atlantic passenger plane, where Miss Pat is liable to tell an audience member condescendingly: “Just think what you are going to mean to William Faulkner!”
With minstrelsy, vaudeville and a little bit of “The Twilight Zone,” Wolfe’s 1984 play imagines the African-American experience as a series of museum exhibits in which stereotypes and myths are cloaked in a kind of heightened fabulousness. As actors in mannequin-style poses begin to move and speak, the lines around this social critique start to crack, exposing the brittle, sometimes angry truths that ripple under the masks.
As directed by Jasmine Guy for True Colors Theatre, this theatrical time capsule seems rather dated. And on the big auditorium-style stage of the Porter Sanford III Performing Arts Center, it comes off as an unwieldy and technologically challenging endeavor.
Some of the vignettes (“Cookin’ With Aunt Ethel,” “The Photo Session”) feel like trifling filler material or B matter; others (“Symbiosis,” “Soldier With a Secret”) speak to grand heartbreak and disappointment but never congeal emotionally; others yet (“The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play”) work as smart social satire, striking a fine balance between comedy and the dire self-analysis of a people.
In what is surely the highlight of the evening, Enoch King gives a delicious performance as the fierce club queen Miss Roj, who purports to wear life like a gay accessory. That is, until the rum kicks in and all the hurts of her past come brimming to the surface. King’s performance is pitch-perfect, unlike anything I’ve ever seen from this dynamic young actor.
“The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” in which Je Nie Fleming’s Mama wears a smock that’s made from the same fabric as the couch, sends up Lorraine Hansberry’s burnished “A Raisin in the Sun” and Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls …” to hilarious effect. In this segment King plays Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie Jones, a man of many frustrations, not the least of which is his Afro-centric, Juilliard-going sister, Medea (Amber Iman).
“The Hairpiece,” in which a woman’s wigs start conversing with one another while she primps in the mirror, is very funny; and though its conceit seems rooted in the ludicrousness of ’70s obsessions with all things hair, it packs the laughs and delivers its messages about sexuality and objectification. (The cast also includes Ali Amin Carter, Danielle Deadwyler and Yakini Horne, who are particularly good in the wig-out vignette.)
Russell Gunn’s original musical compositions are all of piece with the funkadelic mood of the show. Kat Conley’s set -- a modular affair with opening doors and some curvy edges -- would look right at home on an episode of the “Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” and Sydney Roberts’ costumes also strike just the right vintage poses.
But Guy and her crew can’t seem to get the gremlins out of the sound system, and I’m not sure playing this piece as a Broadway-scale spectacle really serves the material, which is about compartmentalization and the curating of humanity. There are some nice performances here, but the show feels spooky, more tepid than hard-hitting, and not nearly as meaningful as the work it sends up.
“The Colored Museum” feels oddly out of joint with the here and now. Could this be progress? Is there a choreographer in the house? Have we all gone mad? A visit to “The Colored Museum” kind of makes you wonder.
Theater review
“The Colored Museum”
Grade: C+
8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. Through April 17. $20-$45. True Colors Theatre, Porter Sanford III Performing Arts Center, 3181 Rainbow Drive, Decatur. 1-877-725-8849; ticketalternative.com.
Bottom line: Absurdist look at black stereotypes feels more dated than classic.
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