Women of Color Women of Word-- African America Female Playwrights-- Before It Hits Home

women of color women of words

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem

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ntozake shange

PRODUCTION HISTORY

First performed at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside of Berkeley, California. First produced in New York City at Studio Riobea in 1975; produced Off-Broadway at the Anspacher Public Theatre in 1976; produced on Broadway at the Booth Theatre that same year.

CHARACTERS

Lady in Brown

Lady in Yellow

Lady in Purple

Lady in Red

Lady in Green

Lady in Blue

Lady in Orange

SETTING

A bare stage. Each of the women lives in a different city but the same space: Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Manhattan, and St. Louis.

PLAY STRUCTURE

One continuous movement from beginning to end comprised of twenty titled poems.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Authors words: "In the summer of 1974 I had begun a series of seven poems, modeled on Judy Grahan's The Common Woman, which were to explore the realities of seven different kinds of women. They were numbered pieces: the women were to be nameless and assume the hegemony as dictated by the fullness of their lives."

EXCERPT FROM THE PLAY

lady in orange:

our whole body

wrapped like a ripe mango

ramblin whippin thr space

on the corner in the park

where the rug useta be

let willie colon take you out

swing your head

push your leg to the moon with me.

ARTICLES/REVIEWS

Splawn, P. Jane. "'Change the Joke(r) and Slip the Yoke': Boal's 'Joker' System in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls ... and Spell #7". Modern Drama. 41(3):386-98. 1998.

Huse, Nancy. "Because the Rainbow Is Not Enuf". Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. 2(3-4):490-93. 1996.

Qureshi, Amber. "Where the Womanisms Grow: Ritual and Romanticism in for colored girls who have considered suicide". Notes on Contemporary Literature. 26(4):6-8. 1996 Sept.

Kim, Jeongho. "Discursive Strategy of Feminism Drama: Caryl Churchill and Ntozake Shange". The Journal of English Language & Literature. 41(2):533-55. 1995.

Waxman, Barbara Frey. "Dancing out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker". Melus. 19(3):91-106. 1994 Fall.

Lester, Neal A. "Shange's Men: for colored girls Revisited, and Movement Beyond". African American Review. 26(2):319-28. 1992 Summer.

Thompson-Cager, Chezia. "Superstition, Magic and the Occult in Two Versions of Ntozake Shange's Choreopoem for colored girls and Novel Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo". Mawa Review. 4(2):37-41. 1989 Dec.

Sandra Hollin Flowers, "`Colored Girls': Textbook for the Eighties". Black American Literature Forum. 15(2):51-54. Summer, 1981.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc. 1977

Bantam Books, 1980

Schribner, 1997.