George Wolfe

Wolfe, George (b. 1954), dramatist, librettist, and innovator in the satirical revue and the black musical. Born in Frankfort, Kentucky, George C. Wolfe took his BA in directing from California's Pomona College in 1976. While attending Pomona, he won the regional festival of the American College Theatre Festival in 1975 with a comedy–satire titled Up for Grabs and in 1977 became his region's first repeat winner with Block Party, which centered on the difficulties facing a black male attempting to move beyond the block (literal and figurative) that shaped him. Receiving his MFA in playwriting and musical theater from New York University in 1983, he wrote the libretto for Duke Ellington's music in Queenie Pie, produced at Washington's Kennedy Center in 1986.

While Queenie Pie had a moderate success, Wolfe's main claim to attention and acclaim that year was The Colored Museum, a collection of eleven exuberantly inventive exhibits, brief scenes highlighting African American oppression and the culture that evolved with and against it. In the first exhibit, an ever-smiling stewardess addresses the audience as passengers on “Celebrity Slaveship,” a device implying the grip of the past and continuing racist exploitation amid apparent progress. Other exhibits, including the upwardly mobile black who temporarily “kills” the raging kid inside him and the Frenchified singer who rewrites her roots, expose the manifold ways in which blacks have striven to evade the pain shaping them. The most noted exhibit, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” satirizes major black theatrical responses to oppression, from Lorraine Hansberry's emotive realism and Ntozake Shange's poetic feminism to race-submerging classicism and the problem–denying black musical. The final exhibit, a party described by the character Topsy Washington, linking opposites like Aunt Jemima and Angela Davis, proclaims that all the past, pain, complexities, and contradictions are inescapable parts of black identity. While most critics applauded its production at New Brunswick's Crossroads Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival, Thulani Davis argued that the play was misogynistic and trivialized black struggle.

In 1989 Wolfe faithfully yet innovatively adapted three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston for the stage in Spunk. Wolfe's device of having the tales introduced by Guitar Man and Blues Speak Woman while interacting with the Folk (a chorus representing black folk) was spiritually akin to Hurston's frame for Mules and Men (1935).

In 1990, Wolfe directed an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Apart from the quality and inventiveness of the production, which reset the play in Francois Duvalier's Haiti, this adaptation was notable for being written by Wolfe's critic Thulani Davis.

Jelly's Last Jam, Wolfe's exhilarating proof that musicals need not sidestep pain and problems to be successful, was produced to wide acclaim in 1991. A tribute to Jelly Roll Mortonthat shows him denying his black roots as the singer did in The Colored Museum, Wolfe's musical emphasizes the role of suffering and community in the creation of jazz. In 1993, he won a Tony as best director for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, and in 1994 he was nominated for the same award for Angels in America: Perestroika. A multiple award–winning writer, adaptor, and director, Wolfe is among the most imaginative creators in American theater today.

Bibliography

• “George C. Wolfe,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 49, eds. Daniel G. Morowski et al., 1988, pp. 419–424.
• Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., “George C. Wolfe,” in Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays, 1988, pp. 507–508.
• Marc Silverstein, “Any Baggage You Don't Claim, We Trash”: Living With(in) History in The Colored Museum,” American Drama 8:1 (Fall 1998): 95–121

Steven R. Carter

Wolfe, George C. (b. 1955), director, playwright, and manager. The multitalented African American was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at Pomona College and New York University before making his Off‐Broadway writing debut as lyricist and librettist for Paradise! (1985). Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986), a satirical look at racial stereotypes, brought him acclaim, but he would soon be better known for his directing credits and was named a resident director at the New York Shakespeare Festival, becoming artistic director in 1993. In addition to staging many classics and new works, Wolfe also wrote the librettos and staged the Broadway musicals Jelly's Last Jam (1992) and The Wild Party (2000) and directed the innovative dance piece Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk (1996).

playwright; theatrical producer; theatrical director

Personal Information

Born on September 23, 1954, in Frankfort, KY; son of a government worker and a school principal.
Education: Pomona College, BA, 1976; New York University, MA in musical theater arts, 1983.

Career

Playwright and director, 1978-; New York Shakespeare Festival, head director and operator, 1993-.

Life's Work

In the spring of 1993 George C. Wolfe was named the new head of the New York Shakespeare Festival, one of Manhattan's most influential theater projects. At the time he took over the New York Shakespeare Festival, Wolfe was still a young man, but he had nevertheless compiled a body of work that lifted him to national prominence. He was the author of The Colored Museum, a satirical comedy, and Jelly's Last Jam, a production that began a long Broadway run in the early 1990s. Wolfe also forged a reputation as a premier director, working with the Shakespeare Festival and at other venues on such pieces as German playwright Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle and Tony Kushner's epic drama Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. These and other plays bearing Wolfe's influence have established him as "one of the leaders of a new generation ... in the American theater--one whose work raises provocative questions about racial culture, history, and identity," to quote Los Angeles Times contributor Hilary De Vries.

The New York theatrical community reserves its greatest respect for those people who can merge the sometimes conflicting considerations of art and commerce--those who can craft a hit play that also pleases the critics. Wolfe's Jelly's Last Jam was one such play, selling out on Broadway while garnering eleven Tony Award nominations and winning three. Observers expected Wolfe to bring this concept of heightened commercialism without artistic sacrifice to the Shakespeare Festival. Wolfe himself told the Los Angeles Times: "I don't think you have to compromise edge for entertainment; in my life, they've gone hand in hand.... When you go to the theater, you can experience somebody trying to deal with his own vulnerability, and it's affirming to see the struggle and the attempt to survive. I think that's what good theater does."

Found Love of Theater Early

Wolfe was born on September 23, 1954, the third of four children in a middle-class Frankfort, Kentucky, family. His mother was a teacher who rose to be principal of an elementary school. His father worked for the Kentucky state government. In his early youth, Wolfe lived in "a very insular world" that included little contact with those outside his race. "There were white people, but I didn't feel they had any severe impact on me," he told the Los Angeles Times. "The church was all black, the grade school was all black. I knew I couldn't go down to the local movie theater and see '101 Dalmatians,' but it was a nice and polite little world."

Wolfe's parents and teachers groomed him to move beyond the "polite little world," and in his teen years he discovered his life's passion. At the age of thirteen he traveled to New York City and saw the Broadway staging of Hello, Dolly!. Afterward he was determined to become an actor. Part of Wolfe's drive came from his parents, who instilled in him a need to succeed in a white dominated field. Wolfe told the New York Times: "I was 13 or 14 before I was thrust into the white world. And ever since then it's become clearer and clearer to me that I was part of a generation of black children who were raised like integration soldiers, who were groomed to invade white America. I don't know how conscious it was, but with my parents it was definitely: 'They think you're less than; you've got to be better than.'"

Wolfe joined theater workshops in Frankfort and continued to pursue acting in college, first at Kentucky State University and later at Pomona College in California. After earning a Bachelor's degree in theater arts, he settled in Los Angeles, where he wrote, directed, and acted in plays. For a time in the 1970s he was associated with the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles as a playwright and director, but he gradually became disenchanted with California. "The goal of success in L.A. was not theater, but movies and TV, and I knew that wasn't right for me then," he told the Los Angeles Times.

Made a Name as Playwright and Director

In 1979 Wolfe moved to New York City. He enrolled in the Master's degree program in musical theater at New York University and continued to write, act, and direct. "I struggled for six or seven years," he admitted in the New York Times. Amidst the years of struggle he saw his first play produced, a work called Paradise that was presented Off-Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1985. The Los Angeles Times noted that the play, "a musical about a family that escapes to an island, was largely savaged by area critics." A better reception awaited Wolfe's next production.

Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times that he wrote The Colored Museum as a personal "exorcism" of black cultural myths. The work was an outrageous, satirical look at black people that dared to challenge some of black Americans' most cherished icons, including Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun and political activist Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. The piece, modeled on a revue, includes skits in which a young black woman must choose between two hairpieces, one an Afro, one a Euro; a segment in which a hefty black woman reminiscent of Aunt Jemima stirs a cauldron of unidentified stew; a monologue from a black transvestite; and a sketch in which a flight attendant takes her passengers through three centuries of African-American history. New York magazine columnist John Simon called the work "young in spirit, gifted in most aspects ... a sophisticated, satirical, seriously funny show that spoofs white and black America alike. It is remarkably unafraid of lampooning black foibles, which is a sign of artistic maturity. We come of age--all of us, black or white--when we can laugh at ourselves."

The Colored Museum had its premier at the Crossroads Theater in New Jersey in 1986. The show's New Jersey producers hailed Wolfe in the Los Angeles Times as "a courageous and fresh voice, ... a new voice." Within a year the play moved to New York's Public Theater--home of the Shakespeare Festival--and later it was broadcast on public television as part of the Great Performances series. "That's when my career started to feed me," Wolfe told the New York Times.

Not everyone greeted The Colored Museum with enthusiasm, however. The play's content and mordant satire drew charges of reverse racism from some critics. Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times: "When [the play] opened, the self-appointed black crowd said, 'This is horrifying. This is horrifying. I can't believe he is actually saying that'.... And that was painful. Because that was exactly the place where I was coming from.... All the whites went into programmed guilt and the black people went into programmed rage and the play kept saying, 'You can't do that.' It was really a play about self-empowerment. About how I am now going to define myself the way that I am capable of." In a sense, The Colored Museum prefigured other popular black satires such as In Living Color that dared to explode black cultural myths.

The success of The Colored Museum brought Wolfe other opportunities under the aegis of the Shakespeare Festival. He became a resident director at the Public Theater and worked on a number of projects there. Most notable among these was Spunk, a series of three vignettes he adapted from short stories by renowned author Zora Neale Hurston, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, an adaptation of a Brecht play done by Thulani Davis. Both works premiered at the Public Theater in 1990 and received good reviews. New Yorker critic Mimi Kramer wrote of The Caucasian Chalk Circle: "The production is uplifting and exhilarating in a way that New York Shakespeare Festival theater hardly ever is: through simply showing a work to its best advantage and giving the audience a good time." Likewise, New Yorker columnist Edith Oliver praised Spunk for its "powerful injection of irony and wit," and concluded that the piece was "a beautiful show."

Wolfe directed other plays and performance art pieces at the Shakespeare Festival, but in the early 1990s he sought to produce a musical for Broadway. This was a risky undertaking because musicals are expensive to mount and require extensive preparation and rehearsal. Wolfe's musical, for which he wrote the book and helped to write the lyrics, was based on the life of Ferdinand Joseph LeMenthe "Jelly Roll" Morton, a 1920s New Orleans jazz musician. In the play, Jelly Roll is given a supernatural opportunity--like the one afforded Ebenezer Scrooge--to review the important and formative moments of his life. The show features songs and tap dancing as well as a portrait of a man uncomfortable with his racial origins. Wolfe not only wrote the play but directed it as well.

Jelly's Last Jam had its premiere in Los Angeles in 1991 and moved to Broadway in 1992 with Gregory Hines in the leading role. Edith Oliver called the play "an ironic, tough evocation of the complex, embittered, and anything but heroic man who wrote and played [jazz]," adding that "The book, strong enough to justify the narrative and the characters, the music and the emotions, is Mr. Wolfe's accomplishment. There has never been anything like it, on or off Broadway." And E. R. Shipp commented in Emerge that the depth and boldness of Jelly's Last Jam made Wolfe "the hope for the future of American theater.... He [shows] theatergoers that so much that is referred to as black culture is really about being human."

On the "A-List"

A New York Times reporter claimed that the success of Jelly's Last Jam "propelled [Wolfe] onto producers' A-lists and garnered him the choicest of this [1993] season's assignments on Broadway." That "choice assignment" was Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner's epic drama Angels in America, a sweeping look at gay America, AIDS, and politics for which a sequel was almost immediately planned. Wolfe directed Angels in America, which opened on Broadway in May of 1993. In a review of the three-and-a-half-hour play, Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll called the work "the most intelligent, most passionate American play in recent memory," adding that Wolfe was "the perfect director for the play's ricochet rhythm between realism and fantasy." Of his success Wolfe told American Theatre "When I did Jelly on Broadway, I said to myself, 'Okay it's going to be three or four years before I come back to this arena.' All of a sudden I was back the next year with Angels. All of a sudden, the next season I was back with Part 2.... It's fun and exciting and dangerous to work on Broadway, but it's also extraordinarily exhausting because of the warrior energy you have to have."

Just before Angels in America opened, the board of directors of the New York Shakespeare Festival announced that Wolfe would be the new head of the Festival. Wolfe took the reins of the institution from JoAnne Akalaitis, a producer-director who had run it for eighteen months. In making the change in leadership, the Festival's board of directors cited declining revenues and waning corporate support for the program and its Public Theater. American Theatre magazine said that part of the decision to make Wolfe the new head had to have been the fact that Wolfe had "become one of the most sought-after directors in the country by making the cultural leap from 'Jelly's Last Jam' to 'Angels.'" Wolfe, who had for years half-jokingly called himself "the Negro at the Public," enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to revive the flagging fortunes of the Shakespeare Festival. He planned to accent diversity in programming and casting, to invite more participation from minority playwrights, and to produce "a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America," to quote Wolfe in the New York Times.

Asked about his vision for the Shakespeare Festival, Wolfe told Newsweek: "I see a brilliant, dangerous new musical on one of the main stages [at the Public Theater]. Upstairs, a workshop of a play by a writer who failed last season but has come back with a marvelous play. On the top floor, a young director is staging his first Shakespeare. On the other large stage, I'm directing a Restoration comedy because by now the endowment is so large I can relax. And downstairs, there's a series of solo artists, white, Asian, and Hispanic." Wolfe hoped to attract new sponsors for the Festival and revive former sources of revenue, all the while maintaining artistic control over the institution's offerings. One big concern was that the theatre had been supported by its sale of "A Chorus Line" years before and that money had started running out. He began with a 1994 budget of roughly four million dollars.

He started out, much as his dream, with the play "Blade to the Heat" in rehearsal on one floor, on another floor the Young Playwright's Festival was going on, Hal Prince was planning a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa called "The Wild Party" in which Toni Collette played the lead Queenie, a jazz-age hostess, and Barry Edelstein was doing "Merchant of Venice." Wolfe won a Tony Award nomination for directing "The Wild Party." Wolfe also put on the famous show "Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk." He started his reign with a bang and never looked back.

"Topdog/Underdog" came out in 2001 with Wolfe directing the play about a duo of brothers who were abandoned by their parents when they were teenagers. Variety said of the show, "With director George C. Wolfe displaying his typical showmanship and style, they ... bring a sort of vaudevillian energy and style to some of the livelier physical set pieces. Among these are Cheadle's dance of disrobement, as he takes off two complete layers of clothes he's 'boosted' from a store, and a sort of impromptu Southern song routine celebrating Lincoln's payday." In 2002 Wolfe wrote and directed a permanent production for the Apollo Theater--"Harlem Song." The show dealt with significant historical moments in Harlem's history and had original music written by the same team that did the music for "Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk," Daryl Waters and Zane Mark.

In 2003 Wolfe put on the play "Radiant Baby," a story that centered around graffiti artist Keith Haring who became amazingly popular and then at age 30 was diagnosed with AIDS and at age 31 died. Wolfe said of the play, "Working on this show was like reactivating a decade--how people looked and how people walked and what crowds were like. Doing theater and doing art, it's always so hard. And doing it in New York, it feels especially hard. The work takes something from you, but it also gives something to you. For me, it rekindled certain memories--very sad ones but at the same time very joyful and foolish ones." He also directed and produced the musical "On the Town." The play was met with mixed reviews and seemed rather controversial because Wolfe changed the original dance scenes and some purists didn't approve. Among the long list of other productions Wolfe has been involved with, Wolfe has been responsible for bringing "Julius Ceasar," and "The Taming of the Shrew" to Broadway. He also directed the Tony Kushner musical "Not Just Pocket Change."

Rich of the New York Times hailed Wolfe as a producer-director-playwright who "crossed over from the American to the African, from drama to satire to musical theater, from verbal elegance to visual dash. He is one to try anything rather than take no for an answer." Assessing his own capacity to create new directions for American theater, Wolfe told the Los Angeles Times: "I'm a warrior.... I know the right conditions under which good work happens. And there are a number of artists who may not be as good at being warriors as I am, but they're good artists. If I can use my connections and the force of my personality to create structures for other artists, great, because other people did that for me."

Awards

Selected: Obie Award, 1990; Drama Desk Award, 1992; Dorothy Chandler Award, 1992; Tony Award for best director, 1992, for Jelly's Last Jam; HBO/USA Playwrights Award; New York University Distinguished Alumni Award.

Works

Selected works

• Paradise, produced Off-Off Broadway at the Playwrights Horizons, 1985.
• The Colored Museum, first produced at the Crossroads Theater, New Jersey, 1986; produced at Public Theater, New York, 1986; broadcast on PBS-TV as part of Great Performances series, 1991.
• (Adapter) Spunk (three one-act plays based on stories by Zora Neale Hurston), produced at Public Theater, 1990.
• (Director) The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1990.
• (Director) Fires in the Mirror, 1991.
• Jelly's Last Jam (musical), first produced in Los Angeles, 1991; produced on Broadway at the Virginia Theater, 1992.
• Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, 1993.

• Also author of Queenie Pie, Hunger Chic, and Minimum Wage.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Dramatists, Sixth edition, St. James Press, 1999.

• Advocate, April 15, 2003, p. 52.
• American Theatre, May-June, 1993, p. 43; December, 1994, p. 14; December, 2003, p. 32.
• Emerge, November 1993, pp. 63-66.
• Entertainment Weekly, December 4, 1998, p. 87; August 24, 2001, p. 127.
• Essence, February, 1991, p. 35.
• Jet, May 29, 2000, p. 54; May 27, 2002, p. 52.
• Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1991, p. Calendar-6; November 24, 1992, p. Calendar-1.
• National Review, January 24, 1994, p. 71.
• New Criterion, January, 1999, p. 43.
• New Leader, May 9, 1994, p. 23; December 14, 1998, p. 30.
• New Republic, January 21, 1991, p. 28; May 24, 1993, p. 29.
• Newsweek, May 7, 1990, p. 62; March 29, 1993, p. 63; May 17, 1993, p. 70.
• New York, November 17, 1986, p. 119; May 18, 1992, p. 61; May 17, 1993, pp. 102-03.
• New Yorker, November 10, 1986, p. 120; May 7, 1990, p. 83; December 17, 1990, p. 110; May 11, 1992, p. 78; October 26, 1992, pp. 117-18.
• New York Times, March 13, 1993, p. 14; March 21, 1993, p. H-1; March 22, 1993, p. C-1.
• Time, December 22, 2003, p. 123.
• Variety, November 30, 1998, p. 73; July 12, 1999, p. 46; October 18, 1999 p. 50; August 28, 2000, p. 48; October 30, 2000; August 6, 2001, p. 25; April 15, 2002, p. 36; June 17, 2002, p. 43; March 10, 2003, p. 40; December 8, 2003, p. 63.

• Additional information for this profile was provided by the New York Shakespeare Festival.

— Anne Janette Johnson and Catherine V. Donaldson

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George Wolfe, an employee of the United States government, worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 and 2004. Wolfe sat on the CPA's Program Review Board, the committee that made the final recommendation to CPA Administrator Paul Bremer over the $20 billion of contracts the CPA awarded. For its final three months Wolfe served as the Board's chairman. As chair of the Board he was also the Senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. Essentially he was Iraq's de facto Treasurer.

The KPMG audit of the Development Fund for Iraq reports that scheduling a meeting with Administrator Bremer had proven difficult. Then Bremer departed from Iraq early, leaving important loose ends dangling—like the audit.

The auditors looked to Wolfe, the next most senior financial officer after Bremer for cooperation. However Wolfe:

...was unable to acknowledge the fair presentation of the statement of cash receipts and payments, the completeness of significant contracts entered into by the DFI and responsibilities for the implementation and operations of accounting and internal control systems, designed to prevent and detect fraud and error.

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