Classic satire shows its True Colors

By Marlyncia Pierce

Miss Pat, a perky flight attendant, warns to “fasten your shackles” as Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre brings the 1986 classic satire “The Colored Museum.” While Miss Pat (Amber Iman) lays down the rules for the flight — no drums, no rebellion — we expect our ride to be turbulent with laughter all the while stricken with heavy truths. The play is set up like a museum with 11 exhibits, all taking jabs at stereotypes surrounding African Americans. Even 25 years later, George C. Wolfe’s timeless play falls in place as True Colors handles the colorful, sophisticated context with special care.

As the director for her third True Color’s performance, Jasmine Guy extends the talent of six actors to unravel the absurd yet hysterical exhibition. She first got her feet wet in the director’s pool with “For Colored Girls,” and later with “I Dream: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Guy spruces up Wolfe’s script with insertions of present-day motifs, including pokes at the current dance craves like “The Dougie” and “The Stanky Leg.” Oddly, the 90-minute exhibition plays through without an intermission, leaving little room to digest the messages in their entirety. In real life, no one breezes through a museum without a small second (or in this case, a 15 minute intermission) to reflect and ponder on the message. Another fault were the kinks in the sound system, which were a bit distracting. But the cast’s resilience over the technicalities can’t go unrecognized.

The vignette “Soldier with a Secret,” performed by Ali Aman Carter speaks volumes on the troubled soldiers coming home after war. The monologue is followed by a lighthearted, but toilsome “The Last-Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” which pokes fun at theater classics, “Raisin in the Sun” and “For Colored Girls,” a choreopoem that Guy also directed for True Colors’ last year. Here, Enoch King stands out as “the angry black man,” whose brows are low from oppression from “the man.” His eloquent touch in other exhibits: the tormented, flamboyant homosexual and the conformed, token black guy are breathtakingly delightful.

Self-identity and objectification shows through in “The Hairpiece” as kinky coiled Janine (Yakini Horn) and straight pressed LaWonda (Danielle Deadwyler) hash it out. “It don’t matter the grade, as long as the point gets made,” LaWonda shouts as The Woman (Amber Iman) decides which wig to flaunt on a date to break up with her boyfriend. Horn and Deadwyler are exquisite in their comedic tag-team work over the touchy subject of the black woman’s hair.

Until April 17, “The Colored Museum” will raise questions and eyebrows while the subjects juggle the line between offensive and gratification. The crowd responded with side-crunching laughs and heavy moans for the nerve-striking lines. The Porter Sandford III Performing Arts Center is located on the outskirts of Atlanta in Decatur. As Guy addressed her in greeting to the audience, "If it's good, [the people] will come." For what it's worth (without an intermission and sound problems) — it is good.