On the night I went to see the Public Theatre’s revival of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” it happened to be the birthday of the work’s author, Ntozake Shange, who died last October. The audience learned of this occasion just after the actors took their bows. We’d already been prodded into solemn joy, thrilled by song and dance, and, toward the end of the evening, ushered into the state of bright, shattering anguish that the play’s title promises will surely come. As cheers and little sobs filled the air, the performer Adrienne C. Moore informed us about the happy and slightly disconcerting coincidence, and led us in a moment of silence. Those ripe, quiet seconds, with their intimation of Shange’s presence through art, recapitulated a theme that had been building all night, and which is intrinsic to this ecstatic new production, directed by Leah C. Gardiner. The past, this show says, is not only usable but always somewhere close at hand.
The characters in “for colored girls” are a swarm of unnamed women, identified only by the color each wears: there’s Lady in Yellow (Moore), Lady in Brown (Celia Chevalier), Lady in Red (Jayme Lawson), Lady in Blue (Sasha Allen), Lady in Orange (Danaya Esperanza), Lady in Green (Okwui Okpokwasili), and Lady in Purple (Alexandria Wailes). Their talking—sometimes in quick, heartening exchanges, but more often in monologues—and singing and dancing and rigorous listening make up the whole intensely varied texture of the show. On their bright dresses, the costume designer, Toni-Leslie James, has had printed pictures of the actors’ female relatives. Every time one of the performers moves, the audience gets a rippling invocation of ancestry. The dresses reminded me of the collagelike paintings of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, which layer an emotionally ambiguous domestic present, full of lonely kitchen tables and fraught couches, over the vivid accompaniment of public images—magazine covers, iconic photographs—from the past.
Born in October, 1948, as Paulette Williams, into a middle-class family of race-proud professionals (her mother was a social worker and her father a surgeon), Shange was raised in segregated but nonetheless multicultural North St. Louis—an early template, perhaps, for the diversity among the women in “for colored girls.” They’re from places as mutually remote as Havana, Harlem, and Strasbourg, and their locations in time are undefined; they seem to have conjured up one another in order to appear together onstage.
As a child, Shange was bused to a largely white school, where she was consistently harassed. As an undergraduate, she married an older man, and, after the union quickly dissolved, she attempted to take her own life several times. Her novels, poems, and dramatic works were created largely under the influence of the Black Arts Movement, which, despite its genuinely liberationist leanings, could tilt in a patriarchal direction, and sometimes had trouble acknowledging the offerings of the women in its ranks. But Shange attempted to clear away the larger culture’s static, and to let black women’s voices transmit truly, if not always plainly.
Those voices make it across in their strange and unconstrained way at the Public, where “for colored girls” first débuted, in the summer of 1976. This is a delicate work, a bittersweet cabaret held together only by the alchemical relationships among the actors onstage. Sometimes just a look or a smirk between women keeps the thing feeling real.
And so casting is perhaps the biggest challenge, and it is met emphatically by Gardiner. Moore is as funny here as she was as Black Cindy on the TV show “Orange Is the New Black,” but infinitely warmer, cannier, and more empathetic. Her great power as Lady in Yellow comes from her sense of winking camaraderie with the audience, which grows throughout the show, drawing the viewers out of spectatorial passivity and “casting” them as a crowd of participants. She delivers an aria of humor and false bravado as she regales the audience—which she has already befriended—with the story of her high-school-graduation night. The speech ends in sublime vulnerability:
he started looking at me real strange
like i waz a woman or somethin/
started talkin real soft
in the backseat of that ol buick
WOW
by daybreak
i just cdnt stop grinnin.
Moore’s delivery of Shange’s poetic transliteration of black English—its elisions and rhythms—makes this flowering of first love also a kind of standup routine.
What Moore accomplishes with words Allen does with song. At several points during the show, Allen leads the ensemble in its sung numbers, swerving away from simple melody and into swooping, soaring gospel or foreboding blues. Allen’s voice is powerful, but even more impressive is how she connects that instrument to emotional truth, seeming to pull the sad or lovely or touchingly naïve stories spoken by her castmates onto a higher and more terrifying plane. The guys next to me kept moaning, rightfully, at almost every sound she made.
Okpokwasili speaks with a penetrating, oddly precise timbre that makes the workings of her mind almost visible. She sneaks trace amounts of terror into her otherwise bombastic, hilarious appeal to a former lover: “I want my stuff back,” she says, and the mind somersaults at the thought of all that must have been taken.
The monologue will always be with us, and Shange’s “choreopoem,” as she called it, avoiding the designation “play,” might give us a hint about how to keep it vital. Camille A. Brown’s choreography draws as much attention to bodies as it does to voices—dance numbers are not sideshows but, rather, attempts at articulation. There’s a humility through gesture, an acknowledgment that literature eventually runs up against the limits of language. And speech—even the clear kind that knows exactly what it means—isn’t achieved on its own; each monologue is as much an exhibition of listening as it is of talking.
After one of her most affecting passages, Allen walked calmly back to her place in a circle, preparing to hear out Lawson, who gives the final and most harrowing disclosure of the piece, a tale of soured love, horror, and immitigable loss. As Lawson—monstrously honest, as expressive in the hands and eyes as she is in the voice—spoke, Allen took a sip of water while she looked on. That little rupture in the presentation—Allen was a character and a performer and an onlooker all at once—drew me even closer to the action onstage, implicating me somehow. I might as well have been up there, too. I was hearing and seeing just like Allen was.
Lots of mini-conversations about etiquette (phones off or on, or locked away in some ugly pouch?) have slipped into recent discussions about the theatre—understandably, in this extended moment of uncertainty about the survival of the form. They seem to be by-products of a potentially fatal misapprehension of what the art actually is, and what it might be used for in the future. There is no shortage of outlets for stories artfully told, or for artists of bravery and intelligence to get their visions across. We, of course, want these things from the theatre, but we need much more, too.
Shange’s descendants (including the great Suzan Lori-Parks, who writes play scripts just as crudely funny and idiomatically accurate as Shange’s, and Daniel Alexander Jones, whose multivocal, deeply generous shows make a fractured absurdity of the proscenium) are moving forward to fulfill her promise of an expression that is rigorous and formally fit but also deeply invested in the communalism that neither TV nor film will ever be able to provide as naturally as the theatre. These inheritors make it possible to imagine a theatre of radical—even chaotic—kinship, in which there is no audience and the artist is only an instigator, and where everybody gets to holler and it’s obvious when to fall into a hush. ♦
