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

Did You Know?

• Shange admitted to having attempted suicide on four occasions, and the title was inspired by seeing two parallel rainbows while driving on Highway 1 in Northern California.
• Shange chose the word "colored" in the title so that her grandmother would be able to understand it.

Synopsis

The choreopoem consists of a series of 20 to 22 poems, depending on whether "my love is too" and "positive" are included, choreographed to music that weaves interconnected stories. The cast comprises seven nameless women identified only by the colors they are assigned: lady in red, lady in orange, lady in yellow, lady in green, lady in blue, lady in brown, and lady in purple. The poems address subjects such as rape, abandonment, abortion, and domestic violence, and together they represent sisterhood and coming of age as an African-American woman.

The piece opens with "dark phrases," in which the lady in brown describes the "dark phrases of womanhood" and each woman states where she is from, before they sing nursery rhymes and dance to "Dancing in the Street." In "graduation nite," the lady in yellow recounts being the only virgin on graduation night and having sex with a friend in a Buick. In "now i love somebody more than," the lady in blue describes her past participation in dance marathons and her discovery of blues clubs, ending with a chant of "te amo mas que." By the end, the women come together in a circle, symbolizing the unity they have found through sharing their stories.

Production history

Shange first performed the choreopoem with four other artists at the Bacchanal, a women's bar outside Berkeley, California, in December 1974. After moving to New York City, she and collaborator Paula Moss reworked the piece, and it was professionally produced at Studio Rivbea in July 1975. It later played at the Old Reliable, DeMonte's, and the Henry Street Settlement's New Federal Theatre before opening at the Public Theater in June 1976. Three months later, in September 1976, it moved to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, where it ran for 742 performances until July 1978; Shange performed as the lady in orange at the Broadway opening.

The production toured Australia from February to July 1978, staged at Her Majesty's in Adelaide as part of the 10th Adelaide Festival of Arts, then in Melbourne, Sydney, Townsville, Cairns, and Brisbane. The tour featured original cast members Alfre Woodard, Trazana Beverley, Laurie Carlos, Aku Kadogo, Carol Maillard, and Lynn Whitfield, directed by Oz Scott. The work was published in book form in 1977 by Macmillan Publishing, with a Literary Guild edition in October 1977 and Bantam Books editions beginning in 1980; a cast recording was released by Buddah Records.

Adaptations

In 1982, the play was adapted for television on PBS station WNET-TV as part of The American Playhouse series. Directed by Oz Scott, the adaptation was considered a serious departure from the Broadway production; a New York Times review noted that the choreopoem had been expanded into realistic settings resembling the sanitized atmosphere of an episode of Good Times, reducing the work's emotional impact. The televised production is often seen as a diluted version of the original.

The cast included Sarita Allen, Trazana Beverley, Laurie Carlos, Gregory T. Daniel, Jackie Davis, Pedro De Pool, Lisa Henley, Roger Hill, Brent Jennings, Charles Johnson, Oliver Lake, Jack Landron, Crystal Lilly, Carol Maillard, Ntozake Shange, Alfre Woodard, and Lynn Whitfield. In 2009, Nzingha Stewart acquired feature film rights from Shange, and Lionsgate signed her to write and direct; however, at Lionsgate's direction, Tyler Perry was approached to produce, and he instead took over as writer and director, scrapping Stewart's script.

Stewart remained as executive producer, and the shift drew controversy over whether Perry could properly depict an iconic feminist work, with Oprah Winfrey expressing doubts about making the book into a film at all.

Legacy

The title of For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough, a 2012 anthology edited by Keith Boykin, was based on Shange's title. The work has been performed in colleges, universities, art spaces, and theaters worldwide, and has been set in beauty shops, prisons, and other historical periods. A Brazilian production dropped the word "color" from the title, and a group in Kentucky made it about class instead of race. In a Season Four episode of A Different World, a character performs a segment from the play during an audition.