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for colored girls who have considred suicide when the rainbo is enuf

Presented by People Productions at Sorenson Unity Center

November 4-November 20, 2011

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This is not your mother’s for colored girls, and it’s not Tyler Perry’s either. For colored girls is a “choreopoem,” a series of 20 poems depicting the struggles and obstacles recognizable to any African-American woman. Performed by a cast of seven women, each of whom is known only a color (“Lady in Brown,” “Lady in Green,” etc.), the poems deal with love, fulfillment, abandonment, and abuse, frequently set to music and expressed in dance. Moments of joy are darkened by tales of tragedy, including the Lady in Blue’s visceral account of an abortion and the Lady in Red’s chilling tale of domestic violence. The end of the play brings together all of the women for “a laying on of hands,” in which Shange evokes the power of female unity beginning with the mantra, “I found God in myself/and I loved her/I loved her fiercely.”

Tyler Perry’s 2010 For Colored Girls film brought new attention to Shange’s play, while at the same time giving a false impression of its content. Perry attempted to condense the 20 poems into a single, realistic story which many viewers felt narrowed its scope and universal appeal and robbed it of much of its joy. Ntozake Shange herself (the name means “she who brings her own things and walks with lions” in Xhosa/Zulu) has updated the script in recent years to deal with the themes of AIDS and the Afghanistan/ Iraq wars—problems that didn’t exist in 1975—without lessening a theatrical experience that New Yorker critic Hilton Als called “a firebomb of a poem, a voice all the disenfranchised could recognize, combining the trickster spirit of Richard Pryor with a kind of mournful blues.”

Made possible with a generous grant from Zoo Arts & Parks.