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About The Colored Museum
DECEMBER 20, 1999--Although a very different play from Crossroads Dancing, Jackson Smith says that The Colored Museum is similar in that it "wants us to see layers of historical representation."
Some of those moments are conveyed with videos and slides. "Both scripts require mixing live performance with historical images," she says. Two Oberlin interdisciplinary performance majors--Jade Moore, a junior from Alexandria, Virginia, and Geno Walker, a junior from Milwaukee--are helping Jackson Smith with the technical logistics of blending video into the production. "The Colored Museum is about sorting through a history of masks or masked pain," says Jackson Smith. "Although it's funny on the surface, and it lampoons certain African-American stereotypes, it is also a very serious play about synthesizing history. "The play is wicked satire, very funny, but while I'm laughing I'm saying 'ouch,' I shouldn't be laughing. It's about embracing the madness, about the honest grappling exemplified when the character Topsy says: 'And whereas I can't live inside yesterday's pain, I can't live without it.'" Jackson Smith believes that the ability to synthesize history is often carried more effectively through female characters than through male characters. "This is interesting to me," she says, finding it "curious" that a male playwright, George Wolfe, for example, offers "images and paradigms embracing contradiction and madness" at the end of Colored Museum "in order to attain a level of freedom, and it's women who speak that message." But when the play was first staged in the early 1980s, says Jackson Smith, some critics believed the lampooning in the play was harder on the women than on the men. While all the plays she's directing this winter "share a strong sensibility of how individuals respond to particular historical moments, The Colored Museum takes this on more blatantly." Oberlin's Theater and Dance Department production of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum opens February 11 at 8 P.M. in Hall Auditorium. More information is available at Oberlin's Central Ticket Service, 440-775-8169.
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