| For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a 1975 stageplay by Ntozake Shange. First performed at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside of Berkeley, California, it was first produced in New York City at Studio Riobea in 1975; produced Off-Broadway at the Anspacher Public Theatre in 1976; and produced on Broadway at the Booth Theatre that same year. A heavily edited version of the play was made into a TV movie in 1982 featuring Shange, actresses Laurie Carlos and Tony Award winner Trazana Beverly from the stage production, dancer Sarita Allen, and with noteworthy early-career performances by Alfre Woodard and Lynn Whitfield. For Colored Girls brought to the stage a perspective on what it is to be female and black in the modern United States that many in the Civil Rights Movement era found groundbreaking, especially in the fact that it was, and has continued to be, done in mainstream American stage and media venues. Structurally, For Colored Girls is a series of twenty poems — referred to as a "choreopoem" — performed through a cast of nameless women, each known only by a color: Lady in Yellow, Lady in Purple, and so forth. The poems deal with love, abandonment, rape, and abortion. The performances of the nine actresses are equally focused on their specific stories; e.g., Lady in Blue’s visceral account of a woman who chooses to abort her baby; Lady in Red’s horrifying tale of domestic abuse. The performances are sharp and bone-chilling. Shange's own name means “she who walks like a lion” in isiXhosa, and her writing doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to these hard-hitting issues. Her dealings with the hardships of physical and emotional abuse, the strength of unity, and the tragedy of loss have a focus and passion that has made the play and its incarnations last a generation. The play has its moments of laughter and joy as well. Lady in Brown embodies the tenacity of youth as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. And although the play expresses a certain dissatisfaction with the roles men have played in its characters’ lives, it transcends male-bashing and becomes a message of self-respect and reverence. The end of the play brings together all of the women for “a laying on of hands,” where Shange evokes the power of womanhood as the Lady in Brown begins the mantra “I found God in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.” |
From KETC, Living St. Louis Producer Margie Newman sits down with acclaimed author, Ntozake Shange. She grew up in St. Louis on Windermere Place in the 1950s, and recently returned to the city to speak about Martin Luther King Jr. at Washington University. |
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