Why delay the cheers? The revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is stunning in every aspect. Stunning, you ask? Hasn’t the word long since frayed and deserved consigning to the critic’s trash bin?
Yes, but Shange’s 90-minute collection of poems performed by seven women, each in a designated color (Shange undoubtedly means the pun) returns the adjective to its high-wattage definition. Director-choreographer Camille A. Brown’s production stuns the daylights out of you.
Myung Hee Cho’s set is stunning, featuring five large panels, three of them suspended, and dramatically brightened or darkened by Jiyoun Chang’s lights in colors that match Shange’s scheme for the characters. Justin Ellington’s sound is stunning. And the persisting original music, by Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby, is stunning.
But most stunning, of course, is the text (the slash in the title tips that poetry is about to flow). Every bit as stunning are the cast members and director Brown, who has turned Shange’s work into a dance piece as well as a theater piece. Doing so in her best stage outing in a relatively short local career, she has enhanced the for colored girls value.
The opening and closing sequences in which the women repeatedly raise their arms in united triumph are enough to lift the performance to a spirited and spiritual level. At another moment, Brown has the seven players circle each other while making the familiar “I love you” sign: pinky up with index finger and thump forming the letter L.
That demonstration of joy and community is one of several times before the concluding arm-raises that are at odds with the prevailing burden of Shange’s theatrical essay on perpetual sorrows in Black women’s lives. The sorriest? At least as expressed here: men.
Speaking of being sorry about men, Lady in Blue (Stacey Sargeant) talks harshly about the innumerable times men who’ve wronged her sidle up to say they’re sorry. She wants none of it. Lady in Green (Okwui Okpokwasili) declaims about her “stuff,” how it has been appropriated by a scurrilous man (men?), and how her stuff (listeners can decide what her stuff is) remains hers to keep or to offer when she and she alone decides to offer it.
Almost as an 11 o’clock turn, Lady in Red (Kenita R. Miller) tells the story of Crystal, whose violent man, attempting to force her into a marriage she considers impossible, commits a stunning—yes, stunning—crime. This one is a gasp-getter. Another point to make about it: Just about every Shange poem spoken is in the first person. Crystal’s saga is no exception.
Shange brings up—compulsively, it seems—any number of subjects afflicting Black women’s lives: rape and all women’s lives, abortion, you name it, she gets on to it. Beside outpourings from the Ladies in Blue, Green, and Red, there are Lady in Orange (Amara Granderson), Lady in Brown (Tendayi Kuumba), Lady in Purple (Alexandria Wailes, who signs and speaks), and Lady in Yellow (D. Woods). Under Ellington’s kaleidoscopic lights they each throw off their own lights. Woods’ Lady in Yellow dances as if she’s a tornado tearing up the territory.
Throughout Shange’s propulsive outpourings, lines regularly sting and/or amuse. Such as, “You gave it up in a buick?” Such as, “A friend is hard to press charges against/ if you know him you must have wanted it.” Such as, regarding a first Black male idol, “I never counted George Washington carver/ cuz I didn’t like peanuts.” Such as, ”I usedta live in the world/ then i moved to HARLEM.” Such as, “I had convinced/ myself colored girls had no right to sorrow.” Such as, “we deal wit emotion too much/ so why don’t we go ahead & be white then.”
As for this for colored girls revival, questions are being tossed about as to whether the play is dated— as they are with other revivals this season. The answer—as with most of those other revivals—is of the would-that-it-were sort.
As I watched for colored girls, it occurred to me that it would make sense to pair it on a bill with an important play from earlier this season: Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man, which could be deemed seething of an answer play.
Scott’s play isn’t exactly a rebuttal to Shange, but it does trigger a funny, perhaps pertinent story about how Black women and Black men regard each other: During for colored girls‘ initial 1976 run, I wrote an article for the Village Voice about how Broadway long-runs stay in shape. Interviewing a for colored girls cast member then, I learned she and the other actors noticed that each night of the week had taken on a different audience personality. As I recall, she said Wednesday was the night when attending Black men complained the most vociferously about how they were represented.
Will this for colored girls who consider suicide/when the rainbow is enuf prompt the same different nightly responses? It absolutely should have the same full audiences every night as it does its terrific, uh, stuff.
for colored girls opened April 20, 2022, at the Booth Theater and runs through June 5. Tickets and information: forcoloredgirlsbway.com
