The Intermission
Photographs by Zamani Feelings
The Intermission, the latest offering from The Colored Girls’ Museum, is a workshop production that invites our audience to join in the adventure. Here, a 140-year-old house serves as our protagonist. A colored girl's museum, accompanied by a widow and an ordinary colored girl, navigates intersecting and alternate realities, all in a quest to find their way back home or to each other.
The 2015 Colored Girls Museum exhibit, Open For Business, cast the House (4613 Newhall Street) as a museum in a theatrical memoir born out of a widow's grief. The words museum and colored girl are meant to be ironic. At the time, a museum was how the house felt; it was just a collection of memories and artifacts from a different time—a place one might visit but not Home.
4613 Newhall Street has stood in the exact location for 140 years. She has housed an ever-changing collection of residents. Some came to her as ready-made families, while others arrived as an assortment of mismatched strangers joined only by their shared need for shelter, which the house provided.
In August 2002, Newhall Street welcomed a new family: a couple, a mother and father with three children, a toddler, and two teens—a boy and a girl. The new residents were lively. The three-story Victorian home was full of joy; shouting, laughter, and singing were her soundtrack.
It wasn’t long before the house became attached to her new family, and she worried less about the changing neighborhood, the deterioration or abandonment of her other house friends on the block, and the inevitable wear and tear on her own house parts. She had a family now.
Thirteen years after the family moved into their home on Newhall Street, the father died tragically. The once joyous home becomes quiet, and the widow falls asleep, always leaving one eye open. The girl who resides within the widow tries to wake her up by telling her stories they have always loved. One day, the girl slips out through the widow's open eye.
The house notices the lonely child and offers her companionship while waiting for the right moment to speak. The child , not surprised by the house's abilities welcomes its interest. She confides in the house, telling it that she lives inside the widow, that she has tried to awaken her, but without success. She fears they will have to leave the only home she's ever known. The house and the child play together, and the house ponders the child's dilemma.
The house, invites the girl to a playdate and proposes a unique idea. 'What if we turned me into a show?' she suggested. 'A show about a house that becomes a colored girls' museum. Our show will help the widow remember that this house is still a home filled with love and beautiful memories that are a source of joy when shared with others. She won't be so sad anymore; we can still be friends, and it will be fun building our colored girls' museum together.
The girl was excited. Every day, they met to develop themes; they created characters and designed scenes for all the rooms in the house. They cast art furnishings and people as actors When it was time to open, they were surprised that Visitors worldwide came to the house to witness a colored girls' museum's performances and to visit her art and artifacts. People loved the little museum, they wrote about her, they took photos on her porch, and she won awards. The widow even replaced some of the house's aging parts. The ordinary house was a bright star on Newhall Street for nine years until a zoning violation forced the woman, the girl, and the house into a year-long journey to gain a variance for the museum.
In a twist of fate, they receive a variance that recognizes the house as a Cultural Site and Museum for ordinary colored girls. If the house accepts this new designation as a museum, it can no longer be the colored girls' home. The Colored Girl and her widow must move. The house must stop ACTING like a colored girls' museum and become a museum that can no longer be a home.
What will happen next to the girl, the woman, 4613 Newhall Street, and TCGM? Get involved with this unfolding adventure!
