Terrific comedy comes with a lesson
There’s an inescapable difference between doing George C. Wolfe’s wickedly funny “The Colored Museum” in New York City, where it premiered, and in Spokane, where it is now playing at the Firth Chew Studio Theatre.
The obvious difference: On the night I attended, the audience was all-white (and there were only 19 of us).
Obviously, some of the jokes about Ebony magazine and Jeri-Curl went right over our heads.
Yet one thing is the same: It’s still a terrific, funny and scathing night of theater.
The Onyx Theatre Troupe, in conjunction with the Spokane Civic Theatre, takes this satirical comic revue and gives it a high-energy ride. Director Bryan Jackson should be proud of how many intense and utterly watchable performances he gets out of this 13-person cast.
The show is structured as a series of comic vignettes – a kind of African-American “Saturday Night Live,” with an edge. Most shows of this type are hit-and-miss. The most pleasant surprise of the whole night was this: Every one of the 11 vignettes was engaging at the most basic theatrical level.
It’s one of those shows where I found myself leaning forward to catch every line, because I knew every line had something to say.
The tone is set at the beginning, when a perky flight attendant (Dorothy Davis) welcomes you aboard a slave-ship flight to Savannah and reminds you to “please fasten your shackles.” In case the weight of the joke hasn’t sunk in yet, at the end of the bit a porter wheels a luggage cart across the stage which contains a suitcase, a trunk, and a pair of slaves in shackles.
Nobody said “The Colored Museum” was subtle. Nor is it filled with decorum.
The show continues with a fake cooking show, a spoof of Ebony magazine’s models, and a funny bit about two talking hairpieces (one Afro and one straight) who debate their relative merits as a date hairdo.
The tone remains generally comic, but Wolfe raises many serious issues, a recurring one being: African-Americans can try to ignore their history, but they can’t escape it.
I was surprised by the many riveting solo performances. In “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” Kirk Wayne creates a whirlwind as a cross-dressing “snap queen,” who snaps his fingers to get what he wants and who claims to be an extraterrestrial. One of his lines: “God created black people, and black people created style.”
Alyssa Jordan creates an entire milieu as Lala, a Josephine Baker expatriate, who tries to sound French but is actually from Mississippi. A’dell McAlpine-Whitehead does a manic turn as a deluded and naïve pregnant teenager who “hatches an egg.”
Nicole Hicks-Wedge delivers a dizzying performance as Topsy, a woman who imagines a party where “Nat Turner sips champagne out of Eartha Kitt’s slipper.” Symira Smith delivered a searing and believable monologue as a Vietnam soldier who cracks under the pressure.
Jackson begins the evening with a pre-show slide show of historical images, including old fugitive-slave posters. It’s a fitting mood-setter for an evening that grapples – comically yet seriously – with the repercussions of that history.