The Colored Museum: Ayanna Bria Bakari, Kelli Blackwell, William Oliver Watkins, Iris Beaumier – Photo: Teresa Castracane
Studio Theatre has resplendently re-opened The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe’s biting survey of Black American history, myth, humor, and representation in art and culture.
The entrance and stage of Studio’s Victor Shargai Theatre comprise the galleries, displaying artifacts on the play’s themes, created by students from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Works hung inside the theater, and even the seating, envelope the audience within Psalmayene 24’s environmental production, shrewdly designed by Natsu Onoda Power.
The prime exhibits on view at the Colored Museum are eleven brilliantly-written sketches encompassing centuries of Black lives, since African ancestors arrived in America as cargo, up to the modern age of so-called liberation. On ages of perceptions and misconceptions, Wolfe’s stories speak truth with lacerating wit, and subvert stereotypes with deceptive ease.
It takes a quick company to keep up, and Psalmayene — who’s been impressively busy and beautifully productive across four different shows this past season — has assembled an ensemble that’s up to the task, and always in on the joke.
Not everyone in the house will be sure when to laugh as the exhibits dip fearlessly into discomforting waters. “Fasten your shackles,” warns flight attendant Miss Pat (Ayanna Bria Bakari), in preparation for the first sketch, our hazardous voyage across the Middle Passage aboard the Celebrity Slave Ship.
“And please ignore the drums,” she adds. But the drumbeat travels the Middle Passage with us, of course, carries us through every chapter, every exhibit — literally, in the form of percussionist Jabari Exum, a masterful presence onstage.
Presence only begins to describe the myriad qualities Kelli Blackwell brings to multiple roles throughout, including in the incendiary TV spoof “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel.” Grinning wide, Aunt Ethel stirs up a saucy recipe for her viewers, with “rage” and “attitude” among the spicy ingredients. What could she be cookin’ up?
The taste surely will be bittersweet, as is most of the comedy, riding somewhere between silly and seething, and calibrated to perfection by Blackwell, Bakari, Iris Beaumier, and William Oliver Watkins in “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” the evening’s best of a murderer’s row of great sketches.
An absolutely hysterical parody of all the sorts of stereotypical stage drama Black theater talent have felt confined to, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” finds this ensemble firing at their sharpest.
And, juxtaposed with solid solo sketches like Matthew Elijah Webb’s powerful turn in “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” and duos like Webb and Watkins doing “Symbiosis,” the Mama-on-the-Couch sketch highlights how fluidly Psalmayene moves the revue through its many transitions, setups, genres, and emotions.
The ensemble ends the Mama-on-the-Couch sketch belting gospel, hitting subtle notes of humor, courtesy of composer Kysia Bostic. The notes could have been less subtle, technically, with better amplification for the vocalists.
Although, judging subtlety as it pertains to satire will probably depend on how one empathizes with the pain and rage and attitude that underscore all the humor.
The Colored Museum: Iris Beaumier, Kelli Blackwell, and Ayanna Bria Bakari – Photo: Teresa Castracane
In the ridiculous but oh-so-profound sketch “The Hairpiece,” a single lady (Blackwell) is confronted by her two outspoken wigs — one an Afro (Beaumier), the other long, straight, and flowing (Bakari) — over not just which hair to wear, but what kind of Black woman she must be.
In “Symbiosis,” Watkins portrays a man who’d trash any and every connection to his Blackness — his records, his Afro pick, his first pair of Converse sneakers — in order to get ahead.
Does making progress — advancing the race, as they used to say — require killing off past selves, abandoning who you were for what you aim to be?
Or, are we all better off if we preserve even the painful reminders, keep that history safe, well-curated, and conveniently close, so someday, hopefully, we can look back from a better place and laugh?
The Colored Museum (★★★★☆) runs through Aug. 11 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Tickets are $40 to $95, with discount options available. Call 202-332-3300 or visit www.StudioTheatre.org.
Theater suggestions are part of a critic's job. So when a friend sent a text asking for a recommendation to take his visiting mom to -- "something joyful" on Broadway was the requirement -- I didn't waste a moment responding: Boop! The Musical.
It may seem a surprising answer because the property upon which it's based comes from a cartoon that was popular from 1930 to 1939. Nevertheless, Betty Boop has endured, accumulating legions of cross generational fans and becoming one of the most globally recognized animated figures of all time.
Director and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who has a knack for leaving audiences on a natural high after all his shows, once again brings literal glitter to a work that makes us long for the days when nearly every old-fashioned musical delivered big thrills.
Serene on the surface, seething with desire beneath, Alain Guiraudie's French thriller Misericordia is fascinatingly strange, creepy, and suspenseful.
Much as the filmmaker's masterful 2013 thriller Stranger by the Lake planted a sinister seed by setting a serial killer loose in a tranquil outdoor gay cruising spot, here Guiraudie upends a seemingly wholesome homecoming in the countryside with dark undercurrents of sex and violence.
Although, beyond a couple of pointed shots of male nudity and one shot of bleeding, there's little sex or violence onscreen. Merely the potential for the former and the threat of the latter linger equally over nearly every scene in this odd chamber piece set in a remote village tucked amid the forested hills of Occitanie in Southern France.
Last seen onstage at Theater J putting a tender comic stamp on the remarkable Ruth K. Westheimer in Becoming Dr. Ruth, Naomi Jacobson displays impressive range portraying a very different feisty older lady in José Rivera's thought-provoking Your Name Means Dream.
Rivera -- noted for plays Marisol and Cloud Tectonics, and his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries -- directs the sci-fi drama exploring the relationship between Jacobson's 74-year-old spitfire Aislin and her AI service robot Stacy, played by Sara Koviak.
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