The Colored Museum
by George C. Wolfe

JCSU Ira B. Aldridge Drama Guild Performance

Thursday - Friday, April 2 - 3, 2009
Sarah Belk Gambrell Auditorium
7:30 p.m.

The Johnson C. Smith University Ira F. Aldridge Drama Guild is named in honor of America’s first professional black actor and playwright. After several years of dormancy, the Ira F. Aldridge Drama Guild returned to its home stage in 2008 with a resoundingly successful production of The Day of Absence.

George Wolfe's first major play, The Colored Museum, was first produced off-Broadway. It is an outrageous satirical look at black people. A televised version was featured on PBS’s “Great Performances” giving the country a chance to see what critics and a cadre of black New Yorkers were raving about. The playwright’s funny, yet acerbic observations about black folks force us to look at ourselves and our values.

"We've landed people on the moon, and black folks are still talking about 'good hair', " Wolfe said. “The Colored Museum is a tapestry of a culture that is as outrageous as it is cultured and refined, that is both hard and fragile.”

Some theatergoers have even told Wolfe that seeing The Colored Museum is painful, while others laugh in the aisles. Wolfe delights in the mixed reactions. In one sketch he satirizes plays such as A Raisin in the Sun—renaming it Last Mama on the Couch—which will probably make some squirm.

But Wolfe advises the audience to hang in and see what he's really trying to say. "We have to learn to love the contradictions in us. To say 'Yes, I was that yesterday, but I'm also this and that today.’ We really don't have to choose. We're an amalgamation of all of it," he explained.

About Ira F. Aldridge: Born July 24, 1807, Aldridge’s place of birth is variously listed as New York (most likely), Maryland and Senegal (where he is reported to be of a royal tribe in Africa). He achieved critical and popular acclaim on the European stage. Aldridge was the first actor of African descent to play roles such as Macbeth, Shylock, and King Lear. Educated at the African Free School, established in New York in 1787 by the Manumission Society, Aldridge’s career was mainly in England and Germany. While performing in Lodz, Poland, he died from an affliction of the heart in 1867.