The Colored Museum

In “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” Aunt Ethel continues the theme of Black celebrity with her Down-Home Cookin’ Show. Her character is an unreliable narrator as she is clearly “performing” a Black character on the show which skews the authenticity of her perspective. Her character resembles the stereotypical down-home Black “Mammy” character that white vaudeville performers would historically perform in blackface.

Her recipe to cook a “batch of Negroes” is a stereotypical representation of Black identity (8). To Aunt Ethel, a modern Black person is a simple mixture of trauma and resilience bonded together by humor and music. Aunt Ethel thus reflects more of a white conceptualization of Blackness than anything else.

Aunt Ethel’s casual treatment of what she has created also symbolizes a lack of connection between the modern Black community and the generations that proceeded it. The disconnect between maternal or female figures and their offspring is another theme that Wolfe explores throughout the play.

In “The Photo Session,” Girl and Guy are flat characters and are essentially mirrors of one another. Their genders are superfluous as their primary function is to promote products via the images in Ebony Magazine. They function mechanically, like cookie-cutter versions of Aunt Ethel’s recipe. Their characters also remind us of the value Miss Pat placed upon Black celebrity and commercial worth. Guy and Girl’s human attributes, such as their social and sex lives, are nonexistent, as these are not related to their commercial worth.

Paradoxically, as their life contains no pain, its function is too shallow to be considered appealing, and they instill pity. Because the characters do not experience contradictions, they fail to serve as role models for success. Like functional flat characters in other works, Girl and Guy help to move the story forward by creating a yearning for greater meaning in the theatrical experience.

In “A Soldier with a Secret,” Junie Robinson is a satirical representation of the stereotypical “Magical Negro” character from American cinema. The “Magical Negro” is a trope wherein a Black character, usually with some kind of disability or otherwise disenfranchised, selflessly serves a white protagonist in their journey towards self-improvement. Perhaps the most popular modern examples are John Coffey in The Green Mile and Baggar Vance in The Legend of Baggar Vance.

Ironically, rather than using his magical powers to help a white protagonist discover self-improvement, Junie helps the Black characters improve themselves and the world by killing them and thus helping forestall future pain. This character subverts conventional depictions of both the “Magical Negro” and the war hero. Junie’s perspective and presence also reveals the darker side of life in the play.

In “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” Miss Roj is a flamboyantly dressed transgender woman from inner-city New York. Miss Roj alternates between entertaining the audience and challenging them for ignoring the misery evident in the streets of New York.

Rather than mimic mainstream culture, Miss Roj represents a sub-culture of the “socially undesirable” in 1980s New York. Miss Roj highlights the struggle that marginalized people face when past trauma is compounded by social rejection and the terror of a mysterious disease running rampant within the community. In some ways, Miss Roj plays the fool or jester, the only one permitted to speak the truth.

By calling herself an extraterrestrial Snap Queen, Miss Roj imagines a reality where people can exist outside the prescribed identities or expectations that have been placed upon them. For her, a simple snap of the fingers creates justice, empathy, truth, and understanding. Miss Roj’s drinking, however, highlights her difficulty in trying to sustain this dissociation with reality. Eventually, her demons emerge. These demons symbolize the struggle for identity that Miss Roj experiences as she attempts to suppress the dark reality that surrounds her. 

In “The Hairpiece,” the bald woman is someone lacking a defined identity. The fact that she suffers from alopecia recalls of the story of Samson, who lost his power along with his hair. Like the weakened Samson, the Woman cannot establish her own power or agency. Furthermore, this type of hair loss often occurred as a result of women using relaxers or creating hairstyles that pull at the roots of the hair to mimic white standards of beauty. Her baldness thus highlights the cost of mimic behavior.

In “The Hairpiece,” Janine, the Afro wig, represents an attempt to assert power through the creation of a hairstyle based on the ideology of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s. This movement emphasized a return to natural hairstyles for Black women and away from straightening one’s hair to mimic Caucasian hair. The fact that the Woman does not immediately choose the Afro wig, however, indicates that the Woman is now at odds with what this ideology can achieve for her. This frustrates Janine, who sees herself as independent and strong.

In “The Hairpiece,” LaWanda represents the attempt to use a style that reflects white conventions of beauty. It is ironic that LaWanda points out the Woman “done fried, died and de-chemicalized her hair to death” (19), since LaWanda’s style would probably be responsible for this type of hair loss in the first place.

LaWanda calls herself “hysteria” and “emotion.” These are attempts to align herself with a more feminist approach to social problems, indicating a shift towards a new type of ideology. The fact that the Woman does not immediately choose LaWanda’s style highlights that this version of beautification also no longer serves her.

In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” the narrator serves as a Brechtian device, reminding the audience that the sketch is a performance. His distribution of the acting award trivializes the emotions in the play and keep the audiences focused on the social issues being discussed.

In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” Mama serves as the primary authority figure in the play. The fact that she is so concerned with the social convention of wiping one’s feet before entering the house and observation of Christian religious practices suggests that she has absorbed these white middle-class conventions into her identity via mimicry. She has in essence become the personification of white oppression that her son rails against.

In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” Walter is the protagonist in the play and exists only in relation to the conflict he finds himself within. He is therefore a stock character as his actions appear more like something out of a series of newspaper headlines than like real-life motivated behaviors, despite his good acting and emotions.

In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” The Lady in Plaid is an amalgamation and a satirical portrayal of the characters from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange. The Lady replicates previous writers’ attempts to define and reflect the Black female experience through emotional, poetic performances.

Structurally, she functions much like the Man. Her behavior and speech operate more as a frustration for the Son than anything else. Her nostalgic thoughts of a past life by the Nile and her relationship to her sisters in the diaspora seem disconnected from reality. As a result, within the play, feminist ideas of identity and agency take a back seat to the Son’s struggle with his oppressor.

In “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” in contrast to the Son’s modern, realistic acting, Medea performs in Greek tragic acting style, giving a timeless quality to her performance. Like the dyed and straightened hair in the previous sketch, Medea’s acting has been shaped into a standard acceptable to the white audience by her time at Juilliard, a highly respected performing arts college in New York. As she states, “My speech, like my pain and suffering have become classical and therefore universal.” (28).

In “Symbiosis,” the Man symbolizes the conflict inherent in reconciling one’s identity as a member of the Black community while also attempting to be successful in modern urban America. To get a job and climb the corporate ladder, the Man needs to mimic white people in the workplace and therefore cease to be identified by his Black past.

Unfortunately, this means throwing out his music, as the music itself is tied up a with a revolutionary identity that fundamentally cannot exist beside the corporate one of obedience. Therefore, the music, the clothes, the hair treatments, and revolutionary badges must all be thrown out together. The fact that his “Free Bobby” and “Free Angela” buttons are now jokes—“Free Huey, Duey and Louie!” (34)—highlights the Man’s callus split from the idealized youth of his past.

In “Symbiosis,” the Kid is very much still emotionally tied to who he is. To the Kid, the civil rights buttons are secondary to the music of The Temptations when it comes to his identity. Like the celebrities listed by Miss Pat in the opening sketch, we see celebrity as key to the formation of the Black identity. Yes, Wolfe seems to say, we can move on from our political radicalism, but not our soul. The choice of soul music is not a mistake.

In “Lala’s Opening,” Lala Lamazing Grace serves to explore the phenomenon of Black singers who were successful abroad but did not gain the same fame in the United States, perhaps the most famous of all being Josephine Baker. The fact that Lala creates a new identity with a fake accent and tries to either kill or hide her past belies a childish desire to be loved by the mother who she claims is dead. This echoes the recurring theme of abandonment by the mother. Yet, ironically, just as the US audiences rejected her, Lala has rejected her own child, continuing the cycle of trauma.

Lala’s dream in which she hopes for a machete to cut away all the kinks from Sammy Davis Jr.’s hair, and the image of a pomade “making everything nice and white and smooth and shiny” (45), symbolizes a subconscious attempt to cut down, cover, or polish over her Blackness. The mother figure cuts through this pomade, creating “bloodlines on my back […] On my thighs” (45). This choice of words connotes a multitude of images: the lash of the whip, generational bloodlines, rape, and childbirth.

In “Lala’s Opening,” Admonia, like Junie in “A Soldier with a Secret,” has magical powers that serve the protagonist, Lala, in her bid for self-improvement.

Admonia can magically draw things out from Lala’s past to help her come to terms with her inner struggles and face the inner child Lala has abandoned. So, as Lala is perhaps the most successful mimic in the entire play, it is fitting that she has her own “Magical Negro” sidekick to help her through.

In “Lala’s Opening,” Flo’rance is a white man who holds the power to rename Lala and create her career. Lala herself calls him her Svengali, a reference to a novel about a man who seduces a young girl and turns her into a famous singer. Paradoxically, Flo’rance fetishizes Black woman to the point of having multiple sexual affairs with Black women, thus belittling his role in Lala’s life and their romantic connection. She kills him as a result.

In “Permutations,” like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who wakes up having turned into a cockroach, Normal Jean Reynolds experiences a supernatural event that puts her in conflict with her mother and sets in motion a transformation. In many ways, Normal Jean is a conduit through which the transformation or metamorphosis occurs. The fact that she is a simple, normal person provides hope for the future.

Being alienated from her mother after she becomes pregnant, she symbolizes the disconnect between African Americans and their native roots as a result of the slave trade. The heartbeats she hears of her children echo the drums Wolfe interjects throughout the play.