Original Article from LA Times by Daryl H. Miller
The power of the black experience
The show begins with a scene from George C. Wolfe’s deconstructionist comedy “The Colored Museum” in which a woman, dancing with joyous abandon, tells us there’s a party going on inside of her that connects her to “everybody and everything that’s ever been” a part of African American history. “My power,” she says, “is in my madness and my colored contradictions.”
This playfully in-your-face monologue sets the tone for “Colored Contradictions,” a collection of 10 scenes and songs about the African American experience. Presented at Company of Angels, it’s the collective effort of four directors, 15 actors, a drummer and a weekly changing spoken-word artist.
Perhaps the chief example of its “contradictions” comes in the second half, when a scene from Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy “Electra” — insightfully imagined (by director Ayana Cahrr) and strongly performed (by Kila Kitu as Electra and Lee Sherman as Clytemnestra) — is followed by a mini-musical (written by Paula Mitchell Manning and Robert Max, directed by Angela Duckett) in which black performers in “Gone With the Wind” decry the stereotypical roles they’ve been assigned. In the juxtaposition, we see achievement emerge, triumphantly, out of a difficult past.
Also a highlight is a bluesy treatment of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” (directed by Nancy Cheryll Davis).