THEATER REVIEW : Rep Brings Out Pain Among Laughs in ‘Colored Museum’

SAN DIEGO — If you were bored by museums as a child, chances are “The Colored Museum” was not included on one of your field trips.

Never heard of this 2-year-old sendup of black stereotypes that has been shaking down laughter and tears from New York to London and is now in yet another incarnation at the San Diego Repertory Theatre?

The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles opened a production of George C. Wolfe’s play in May; it later moved to the Westwood Playhouse, where it has been extended through at least Aug. 28.

To say that the “The Colored Museum” as conceived by the Mark Taper is a much slicker, bigger production than the Rep’s is like saying that Daddy Warbucks had a tad more cash than Little Orphan Annie.

The set in Los Angeles looks like polished museum-style white marble, down to the imitation Greek columns. The Rep set looks like cheap, painted wood. The L.A. costumes are bright and flashy, larger than life, like the actors who are wearing them. The Rep costumes are, in contrast, drab in color and design, and the actors here, though very talented, don’t seem to project their voices with the same piercing command.

It’s hard not to miss the polished surfaces in Los Angeles. This is, after all, a play that calls for excesses because it is about caricature. It is about cooking with someone who is a cross between Aunt Jemima, Ethel Waters and a voodoo queen in a skit called “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel” and about lampooning the melodramatics of “A Raisin in the Sun,” as “The Last Mama on the Couch Play.”

But “The Colored Museum” is also, more importantly, a play about pain. And that is something that the Rep cast, under the sensitive direction of Floyd Gaffney, seems to understand even better than the one in Los Angeles does.

Oh, the play never stops being funny. But the jokes have little knives dangling at the ends, as the play moves from Candy Ann Brown’s cutesy stewardess of Celebrity Slaveship (“Fasten your shackles, please”) to the black man in suit and silk tie who figuratively tosses the funkily clad kid he once was into the trash can with his old Jackson 5 records. (“The only proof that Michael once had a black nose,” the kid protests.)

The core five-member cast captures this tribute to complexity as it enters on the revolving stage as a variety of statues, who melt into vignettes and freeze just before leaving again.

As the women, Brown, Angeles Echols and Seraiah Carol move from ingenuous to sensuous to hard-core. Phillip J. Sisson provides solidity as the quintessential straight man, while Hassan Shareef El-Amin stands out as the transvestite, Mis Roj. If El-Amin’s presentation doesn’t glitter as much as Reggie Montgomery’s did in Los Angeles, you never lose the point of the often ridiculous narrative, which never ceases to be about survival.

Whether the characters deal with their pain through denying it under big smiles, like the models in the Ebony skit, or drinking and snapping the bad guys away like Miss Roj, or hiding it under a choice of wigs--Afro or long, flowing tresses, each of which has a personality and a voice in “The Hairpiece”--they come back to the same point:

It’s not that there isn’t truth in stereotypes, but stereotypes are never totally true, because being frozen they cannot convey the complexity of change. They portray Pinocchio puppets where real, live people long to be given the breathing space to keep creating and re-creating themselves.

The playwright once wrote that an interviewer asked him why non-blacks should see a play like “The Colored Museum,” which does not ostensibly deal with them. His response was, “How can a play be about black Americans and not be about all Americans?”

But there is another answer. Anyone who has ever been stereotyped should be able to relate to the bondage of labels that is but one of the many burdens of the past.

This play may target the colored museum as its particular target, but it sends the mind wandering down Museum Row to check out the woman’s museum, the man’s museum, the Asian, Latino, Muslim and Jewish museums. In the particular is the universal. And ,in the very concept of a museum for stereotypes, Wolfe has created a museum for everybody.

“THE COLORED MUSEUM”

By George C. Wolfe. Director is Floyd Gaffney. Set and lighting by Rob Murphy. Costumes by Valeria Watson. Choreography and musical direction by Lewis Chavis. Sound by David Leyton. Stage manager is Andy Tighe. With Candy Ann Brown, Seraiah Carol, Angeles Echols, Hassan Shareef El-Amin, Phillip J. Sisson and Gwen Payton. Percussion by Gene A. Perry. At 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 3. At the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Lyceum Space, Horton Plaza.