When Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf opened at the Public Theater in June 1976, it was shocking, disturbing, disheartening, heartening, reassuring, unsettling, refreshing, exhilarating, life-giving, and, more than anything, an indisputable theatrical event.
After 43 years it returns to the Public and remains everything it was then, perhaps even more so because it hasn’t dated in the least. If anything, it’s even more relevant to a society and culture that is still facing and attempting daily to fight racist attitudes. (Note that it reopens on the day that the current occupant of the White House compares his self-made plight with lynching.)
Shange—born to an upper-middle-class family (her father was a surgeon) in Trenton, New Jersey—wrote what she termed “choreopoems” after fighting demons acquired, among other experiences, after five years living in a segregated St. Louis neighborhood in her preteen years; and, at 19, participating in a failed early marriage, even as she prospered at Barnard.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
It seems evident that as much as anything For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf is a form of self-prescribed therapy—the image of a rainbow the saving grace she found. Restoring herself to new beliefs, she found a way to pass along her inspirations to audiences everywhere by now.
To represent herself and the troubled women she observed around her, she imagined seven figures who match the rainbow colors. She substitutes only one hue—brown replacing indigo, perhaps for obvious reasons. She sends out Lady in Brown (Celia Chevalier), Lady in Blue (Sasha Allen), Lady in Orange (Danaya Esperanza), Lady in Red (Jayme Lawson), Lady in Yellow (Adrienne C. Moore), Lady is Green (Okwui Okpokwasili), and Lady in Purple (Alexandria Wailes).
For 90 explosive minutes, the Ladies exchange Shange’s free-verse lines with each other. They recite what are tantamount to arias (Lady in Blue Allen often sings hers), often while continuing to move as directed by Leah C. Gardiner and as choreographed by Camille A. Brown, who within the last year has distinguished herself with work on, to name a few, Choir Boy, Much Ado About Nothing and Porgy and Bess.
Wearing Toni-Leslie James’ costumes that feature multiple faces dotting monotone outfits, the women dance before they speak. The introductory activity is a virtual dance overture. During it, Brown alludes to familiar childhood preoccupations like hand-clapping games and Double Dutch rope jumping. The effect is thrilling, especially in the area set designer Myung Hee Cho has created—with audience members seated around it—that suggests a mirrored ballroom. A ballroom? With disco balls? Just wait.
Only then do the ladies begin to speak the abundant bouquet of Shange poems that give the impression of having spilled from her unstoppably as she looked with keen eyes at the world she was simultaneously criticizing and celebrating.
It’s impossible to relate the full experience of the terrible beauty she dispenses. The poems are not only written in free verse but more often than not feel like stream-of-consciousness outpourings. Shange intended them to be heard aloud, to work their spells that way. As they come along, myriad subjects arise to tease, trouble, explicate, and enchant.
They encompass topics ranging as widely a young girl’s learning about the great liberator Toussaint Louverture to an older young woman’s wondering whether she should forsake allegiance to black culture in order to live by seeming blander white sensibilities. (Shange does have her humorous side—or, at least, her wry slant.)
A frequent topic is men and women’s compromised standing in relationship to them. (Reviewer’s aside: Sometime after the first production transferred uptown, I wrote an article for The Village Voice about how long-running productions strive to maintain an opening-night level, if indeed they did. The For Colored Girls actress I interviewed digressed at one point to tell me about how cast members judged audiences. The most intriguing comment she offered was that she and her colleagues agreed the most critical patrons they faced were black men.)
There’s an evocative passage in For Colored Girls where singing is mentioned. Here, Shange may be placing herself in the continuum of influential American poets and suggesting that one is Walt Whitman, who sang of the body electric. Certainly the seven bodies present are extremely electric when singing, speaking, and dancing.
There is no first among equals in a group selected not only for their talents but for their disparate appearance enhancing a diversified ensemble. Having handed each of the ladies of color marvelous ideas, convictions, and profound observations about the breadth of a community she’s contemplating, Shange is careful to be an equal rights disseminator. The cast members respond in generous kind.
Full disclosure: The immediate audience for whom Shange is writing would seem to be black women. So where does an older white reviewer fit in to that mosaic? To begin, it’s easy to recognize and sympathize with the issues she raises. They’re inescapable. Furthermore, at the deepest level Shange is weighing human emotions for their universality. Only the inflexibly hardened wouldn’t respond. For that alone, the powerful choreopoet is to be exuberantly sung.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf opened Oct. 22, 2019, and runs through Dec. 8 at the Public Theater. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
