For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a 1975 stageplay by Ntozake Shange. First performed at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside of Berkeley, California, it was first produced in New York City at Studio Riobea in 1975; produced Off-Broadway at the Anspacher Public Theatre in 1976; and produced on Broadway at the Booth Theatre that same year.
The play was first published as a book in 1977 by Macmillan Publishing, followed by a Literary Guild edition in October 1977 and Bantam editions beginning in 1980. A heavily edited version of the play was made into a TV movie in 1982 featuring Shange, actresses Laurie Carlos and Tony Award winner Trazana Beverly from the stage production, dancer Sarita Allen, and with early-career performances by Alfre Woodard and Lynn Whitfield.
"...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 20 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 seven actresses are focused on their specific stories; i.e., Lady in Blue's visceral account of a woman who chooses to have an abortion; and Lady in Red's tale of domestic violence.
Lady in Brown embodies youthful determination as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. 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 Red begins the mantra “I found God in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.”
Lionsgate announced that it was teaming up with Tyler Perry's 34th Street Films for a film adaptation of For Colored Girls. The film will be written, directed and produced by Perry. Shange confirmed that Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, Jurnee Smollett, Whoopi Goldberg, Kerry Washington, Jill Scott, and Macy Gray will star in it. Filming is set to begin in 2010 and will be released on January 14, 2011.
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2 comments:
I have Mad Respect for Tyler Perry. He is the ONLY African-American Director who can create work for himself and other African-American in or out of Hollywood right now. People critize him but and may not like his movies, but way before Tyler was on the Scene,there was Spike Lee,John Singlton,Robert Townsend and Mario Van Peeples....where and what are they doing now? How come all for of these gentleman didn't combine their collective energy and money and talents and open up a their OWN Studio the way Tyler Perry single-handley did own his own and with his OWN money, in atlanta two years ago? see my point?
Tyler not gonna talk about it!
He's gonna be about it....and that is why he's rich, that is why he's his own boss and that's why he's relevent. And you can't hate on him for that. Keep doing you Tyler.
FYI.. I worked With Mrs.Trezana Beverly as Costume Designer for the Off- Broadway Workshop Production of "The Doll Confessions".She was the Director. I am very excited about this film. If only I were around to see the original stage production.
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