On Thursday, March 17, we
went to see Huntington Theatre Company's The Colored Museum, performed
at the Boston University Theatre.
Written by George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum is divided into
eleven “exhibits” that have their own separate plots and characters. These exhibits include “Cookin' with Aunt
Ethel,” “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” and “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch
Play.”
The performance had the air
of a high-budget production. It took
place on a stage within a stage; a room with stark white walls and a patterned,
stone-esque floor had been constructed onstage.
This room was ringed by an equally white proscenium that connected
seamlessly to the proscenium of the venue.
Most of the back wall of this room was on top of a massive rotating
circle in the floor, and whenever there was a scene change—or “exhibit”
change—the wall section and the floor in front of it simply rotated, sending
the current set and props behind the wall, and bringing new ones out in
front. The room also had two
floor-to-ceiling wall sections, located downstage left and downstage right,
that could silently slide open like elevator doors. Occasionally, these would admit moving
platforms and museum display cases that would glide onto the stage by some kind
of mechanism, sometimes turning to face the audience and stopping downstage
center, and other times continuing across the stage and exiting though the
other doorway.
My favorite exhibit of the
performance was “Cookin' With Aunt Ethel.”
This scene was themed as a cooking show, and was almost entirely a
single musical number in which Aunt Ethel described how to cook a pot of
Negroes. I enjoyed the great singing of
Capathia Jenkins, who played Aunt Ethel, but I also enjoyed the exhibit because
the lyrics made a point about the bringing of Africans to the United States to
be slaves.
As the show progressed, the
each scene's connection to the overall theme of the production became less and
less apparent. Near the beginning of the
show, each exhibit made a clear point about African American culture or
stereotypes; however, by the end of the show, I found myself straining to see
these connections. The performance
turned into pointless entertainment, with the deeper meaning lost on me.
I found this performance of
The Colored Museum to be good entertainment, but the connection to the
greater purpose of the piece was lost on me during some parts of the
performance. I tentatively recommend
this production to those looking for mindless entertainment.
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