49 pages • 1 hour read
George C. WolfeThe Colored Museum
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context
By the mid-1980s, New York was in the grips of a rising pandemic that instilled fear throughout the city. Although scientists had discovered clues that a previously unknown virus existed earlier, a report written in 1981 noting a rare lung infection in five previously healthy gay men in the Los Angeles area was the first real alarm. Within the year, other medical professionals had begun sounding alarm bells about similar opportunistic diseases infecting otherwise healthy people. Soon, cases were reported in New York.
By 1983, the disease had been labeled as AIDS by the medical community, and it was sometimes colloquially and derogatorily known as the “Gay Plague.” At the time, the disease seemed to target gay men, sex workers, intravenous drug users, and other people marginalized by mainstream society. The Reagan administration chose to quell public fear by assuring the population that the disease only concerned gay men and drug users.
As a result, there was initial reluctance to fund medical research. Lack of education, ignorance, and other factors caused the pandemic to grow. It was not until 1983 that research into the disease received federal funding in the United States and front-page coverage in the New York Times. By 1985, community activist groups had begun their own education and outreach programs to try and stop the now-rapid spread of the virus as well as fund research projects and care for the sick and dying.
By the time The Colored Museum premiered in March 1986, AIDS cases were soaring, particularly within the Black and Latinx communities of the city. AIDS and its impact on the Black community would therefore have been at the forefront of the minds of those attending a performance of this play.
Literary Context
Bertolt Brecht was a German theater practitioner, playwright, and poet. Growing up in Germany after World War I, Brecht witnessed firsthand as the German masses became emotionally swept up in the rising tide of the Nazi movement. A Marxist, Brecht rejected the fascist ideology.
Within the theater world, Brecht came to believe that naturalistic theater essentially colluded with fascism due to its unspoken assumptions surrounding political power, class, and gender norms. Brecht believed that naturalistic theater presented these relationships as both natural and inevitable. Within the naturalistic theater style, Brecht believed the audience member experienced an immersion into emotional enjoyment, following the plot of the play within the conventions of Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action. Brecht’s “epic theater” eschewed emotional spectacle and was more concerned with making the audience actively think so they would then go out and create real political action in the world.
Brecht attempted to accomplish this goal by using what he called the Verfremdungseffekt, commonly referred to as the “alienation effect.” The techniques used to create this effect included anything that could deconstruct the illusion of the performance piece; characters would often speak to the audience directly, and simply arranged songs were common. Furthermore, techniques such as revealing the mechanical instruments that moved set pieces, actors remaining on stage between scenes, and having each scene resemble a mini-play with large jumps in time were used to prohibit the audience from drifting into an emotion-based illusion of story.
Brecht’s techniques continue to be used today in theater, particularly theater that is interested in social change. The Colored Museum uses many of these alienation techniques to promote social dialogue and political change.
