For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

.

"For Colored Girls" brought a female and black perspective to the stage. According to Hilton Als in "The New Yorker's Critic's Notebook" (March 5, 2007), "...all sorts of people who might never have set foot in a Broadway house -- black nationalists, feminist separatists -- came to experience Shange's firebomb of a poem. ... [T] he disenfranchised heard a voice they could recognize, one that combined the trickster spirit of Richard Pryor with a kind of mournful blues."

Structurally, "For Colored Girls" is a series of twenty poems, referred collectively as a "choreopoem", performed through a cast of nameless women, each known only by a color: "Lady in Yellow", "Lady in Purple", etc.. The poems deal with love, abandonment, rape, and abortion. The performances of the nine actresses are focused on their specific stories; i.e., Lady in Blue’s visceral account of a woman who chooses to abort her baby; Lady in Red’s horrifying tale of domestic abuse.Lady in Brown embodies youthful determination as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. Although the play expresses a certain dissatisfaction with the roles men have played in its characters’ lives, it transcends male-bashing. The end of the play brings together all of the women for “a laying on of hands,” where Shange evokes the power of womanhood as the Lady in Brown begins the mantra “I found God in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.”

See also