ABOUT NTOZAKE SHANGE

Ntozake Shange (1948 - 2018) was born in Trenton, New Jersey. Her father, Paul Williams, was an Air Force surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, was a psychiatric social worker.

Cultural icons such as Dizzy Gillespie, Chuck Berry, Paul Robeson, Miles Davis, and W.E.B. DuBois were mainstays in the Williams home. At the age of 8, her family moved to St. Louis for five years, which at the time was racially segregated. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision, she was bused to a white school where she endured racist attacks and harassment, experiences which later heavily influenced her work.

Shange attended Barnard College and the University of Southern California, earning a BA and MA in American Studies. However, Shange's college years were difficult. Frustrated and hurt after separating from her first husband, she attempted suicide several times before focusing her rage against the limitations society imposes on Black women.

While earning an MA degree, she reaffirmed her strength based on a self-determined identity and took her African name in 1970, which means "she who comes with her own things" and she "who walks like a lion." Shange would go on to a successful triple career as an educator, performer/director, and writer whose work drew heavily on her experiences as a Black female in America.

As she writes in the opening pages of FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF, her first experience of women's theater was the months she spent with Celebration Arts board member Halifu Osumare's The Spirt of Dance in the early 70s, a troupe of five to six Black women who depicted the history of Black dance from its origins in Western Africa through popular dances seen on American streets. Shange remarks, "I learned the mechanics of self-production & absorbed some of Halifu's confidence in her work, the legitimacy of our visions." After 73 performances with The Spirit of Dance, Shange left the company to begin producing FOR COLORED GIRLS.

Regarded for taking the theatre world by storm in 1975, the play received an Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the AUDELCO Award, and Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award nominations. Shange also received many awards for her plays, poetry, novels, children's books, and essays. 

Shange passed in October 2018 at the age of 70. More about her life and work can be found here.

ESSAY

FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE /

WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

The Quintessential Black Girl Magic Play

By Halifu Osumare, Ph.D.

When James Ellison III, Celebration Arts Artistic Director, says, “Black Girl Magic is an expression of positivity and empowerment highlighting the struggles and triumphs of Black women,” he could have been reviewing Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, instead of defining the theme of CA’s 2024 season.

Shange’s choreopoem for seven Black women is a theater classic that pioneered a new genre of drama called choreopoetry and was performed on Broadway at the Booth Theater from September 1976 to July 1978, running for 742 performances. Subsequently performed in regional theaters for the last 48 years, it has inspired many young Black women to find their “Black Girl Magic,” like our Voress Franklin, the Director of this Celebration Arts production. 

The term Black Girl Magic, founded by author and deejay Beverly Bond in 2014, has become an entertainment, broadcast, and apparel brand, including a TV show (Black Girls Rock!) and a podcast of the same name. But Celebration Arts uses the term, just as Ellison says, to focus on “the struggles and triumphs of Black women.” Black women have indeed been the backbone of the Black family and the Civil Rights Movement (remember Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hammer), which changed the face of American race relations forever. The contemporary phrase echoes the anti-racism and pro-women movements that permitted us to reveal the rainbow spectrum of Black female labor, desire, resilience, and, most importantly, empowerment.

I had personal experience with Ntozake and the For Colored Girls poems when I performed dance improvisations to her readings of them in their inchoate state in SF/Oakland neighborhood bars and venues in the early 70s. This is where she honed her famous poems before moving to New York in 1975. Ntozake always collaborated with dancers and musicians in presenting her poetry, so it is no coincidence that she developed the choreopoem, which seamlessly marries the two genres of movement and the word. For Colored Girls is not a linear plot play but a ritual stream of consciousness of Black women’s inner plight and aspirations. (Photo: Ntozake Shange, Halifu Osumare, and Aisha Kahlil in rehearsal at Everybody's Creative Arts Center. Oakland, CA. 1974).

Choreographer Brianna James works beautifully with Franklin in this current production to bring out the movement inherent in the spoken word. From the beginning of Lady in Brown’s prologue poem, “Dark Phrases (of Womanhood),” we are transported into the Black woman’s dilemma orally and physically: “The melody-less-ness of her dance” because she does not recognize her powerful essence. But throughout the play’s 20-some poems, we are guided to the Lady in Brown’s final revelation: “& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide/ but are movin’ to the ends of their own rainbows.”

The sisterhood of the play allows all Black women to find the spectrum of their colors underlying their spiritual power while finding God in themselves and loving Her fiercely.

Ntozake Shange, born Paulette Williams (1948-2018), grew up in an upper-middle-class Black family that hosted some of the Black literati and intelligentsia of the post-war era. Born to a physician father who loved Latin music and a social worker mother, as a child, she was exposed to the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, and Langston Hughes at family house parties.

It is no wonder she became a precocious young avid reader, beginning to write poems as a teenager. Besides her myriad books of poetry and plays, she is a novelist and essayist. She became a pioneering artist of the Black Arts Movement of the late 60s and early 70s, who was well-traveled, exploring the African diaspora throughout the Caribbean and South America. As one of the founders of New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café, her writing is multi-lingual, with Spanish and French weaving their way throughout her unique English vernacular and off-beat punctuations. 

Shange wanted to create her own language that defied the Queen’s English of enforced slavery. You hear this in For Colored Girls when the Lady in Purple says, “I live wit myth & music waz my ol man & i cd dance a dance outta time/ a dance wit no partners/ linger in non-English speaking arms so there waz no possibility of understandin.” She slaughters the Eurocentric language while imagining her own African diasporic myth. (Photo: Halifu Osumare and Ntozake Shange at a reading in 2018 at Hunter College).

Voress Franklin has chosen to cast women of different ages, from their 20s to 60s. This offers a unique view of these classic poems, as females, at various stages of life, pronounce meaning into them based on the phases of life that they’ve personally experienced. She says, “I’m 68 now. I’m not the person I was at 18 or 30. But you can learn from a young person, just like you can learn from an old person.”

This multi-generational cast takes us down the familiar road of FOR COLORED GIRLS, exploring the struggles and triumphs of Black women, defining themselves beyond their relationships with the men in their lives, sometimes contemplating suicide but realizing their inner Black Girl Magic where rainbows are indeed enough.

2024 SEASON OF BLACK GIRL MAGIC

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FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

ZORA & LANGSTON

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MUD, RIVER, STONE

CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY

TINKER THE TOY MAKER

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FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE / WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

BY NTOZAKE SHANGE
DIRECTED BY VORESS FRANKLIN
FEBRUARY 2 - 25, 2024

A groundbreaking work in modern American theater, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE / WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF is a choreopoem following seven women through a world of racism, oppression, and sexism. Filled with passion, humor, and raw honesty, they tell their stories and those of other women they know through a fusion of poetry, music, and dance. FOR COLORED GIRLS premiered at the Booth Theatre in 1976, becoming the second play by a Black woman to reach Broadway, preceded by Lorraine Hansberry’s A RAISIN IN THE SUN.

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ZORA & LANGSTON
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY
IMANI MITCHELL
MARCH 1 - 17, 2024

We find two bright talents at the height of the Harlem Renaissance: Zora Neale Hurston, a fiery novelist with a flair for eccentricity, and Langston Hughes, a cerebral poet who plans to strategize himself to the top. A friendship quickly blossoms, filled with artistic passion, emotional depth, and a streak of competition. But soon, the pair find themselves controlled by the incessant demands of their benefactor, which leads to the demise of their friendship. This play grapples with the complexity of relationships, the passion of artists, and the literary heart of Harlem in the 1920s.

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