In new decades.

In new decades, at least one groundbreaking work of black theater has caught fire, engendering a just discovered genre and/or body of work. The 1950 yielded A Raisin in the sunny place the '60s Dutchman, the '70 for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow was enuf and the '80 The Colored Museum. When The Colored Museum made its off-Broadway first attempt in 1986, Newsweek theater critic Jack Kroll hailed playwright George C Wolfe as a "bold just discovered voice" in black theatre (85) Wolfe's razor-edged satire, which explores the sometimes painful contradictions of being black in America, has inspired a number of writers to expand onward a theme he introduced--the ritual of assessing the value of the culture's daunting legacy of stereotype and icons.

The premise of The Colored Museum involves exhibiting culturally specific characters, situations, and behaviors with the goal of having African Americans evaluate them to determine which are assets and which are detrimental to our progres As part of a younger generation, Wolfe rather than being paralyzed by means of the spell of shame, has consciously chosen to grapple with racial and inflection for sex stereotypes in order to act upon forward freely. His work elicits the iconic figure of the Mammy (Aunt Ethel and Aunt Jemima) still reserves in-depth investigations for her descendants--Mama, Topsy Washington, Walter-Lee-Beau-Willie, Miss Roj et al. The play finiss by asking us which cultural baggage we, as a population wish to claim and which we want to discard. The approaching millennium seemingly provides added incentive for the timeliness of this ritual of inventory and assessment.

Wolfe did not write the play with as it is a lofty agenda in mind, however. His goals were more personal: "I want to destroy these dead, stale, empty icons standing in the doorway, blocking me from my truth" (Wolfe qtd in Kroll 85) Stereotype in addition to being limiting and reductionist, frequently provoke powerful feelings of shame and anxiety in folks and in this way can be crippling inhibitors which undermine self-conceit ambition, and progress. Wolfe's play is an attempt to exorcise the limitations that stereotype place in succession people in general, and artists in particular.

Although The Colored Museum established a formidable starting point, the exorcism of racist black stereotype was a task too enormous to be accomplished with single in kind work. Other dramatists working in the genre include Robert Alexander (I Ain't Yo' Uncle--The just discovered Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin), Matt Robinson (The Confessions of Stepin Fetchit), Michael Henry Brown (King of Coons) rap Devin Jones (Uncle Bends: A Home-Cook african Narrative), Carlyle Brown (The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show) Breena Clarke and Glenda Dickerson (Re/membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show) Marcia L Leslie (The Trial of the same Short-Sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae), and Kim Dunbar (Porch Monkey)

Signifying is a well-established ritual completely rooted in the African American etho In The Signifying Monkey Henry Louis Gates argues that African American literature is "double voiced," with body s talking to other texts, offering critique and revision. The proces of repetition and revision with a signal difference Gates space of times "signifyin(g)." Gates himself signifies forward the work of other scholars, notably Roger D Abrahams, whose attempts to define signifyin(g) preced his own:

The name "Signifying Monkey" shows

[the hero] to be a trickster, "signifying"

being the language of trickery, that set

of words or gesticulates which arrives at

"direction by means of indirection." ...

signal aspects of [Abrahams'] extensive

definitions [include the fact that]

"Signifyin(g)" can mean any number

of things [including the] ability

to talk with great innuendo. (74-75)

In 1992 Harry J Elam, Jr applied Gates's theory to African American theatre, more specifically to The Colored Museum. Since then, a recent body of work has emerg that "talks" to earlier works and between works, the pair critiquing and revising themes and characters, while revisiting and reexamining the theatrical and cultural past.

The brains of place is very important to this genre The Colored Museum is, of course, place in a museum and leads us upon a tour of exhibits, whereas Michael Henry Brown's King of Coon granting cinematic in scope, is placed in Hollywood the couple I Ain't Yo' Uncle and The Trial of united Short-Sighted Black Woman utilize to a certain degree the convention and pile of a trial. While the latter signifies onward the genre of courtroom drama, the former uses the courtroom convention as a jumping not upon point. I Ain't Yo' Uncle retell the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin using the texture of a melodrama, the dominant theatrical form of the mid-nineteenth hundred Re/membering Aunt Jemima signifies upon the structure and conventions of the minstrel display whereas The Confessions of Stepin Fetchit and I Ain't Yo' Uncle use the stage itself as a convention and as a place where the maligned characters turn back to set the record straight.