NEW YORK — For those of us of a certain age, it’s hard to imagine Ntozake Shange first wrote the lines “Somebody/ anybody sing a black girl’s song” nearly half a century ago, and made it to Broadway.
And beyond. Plenty of 1970s kids in the great Black cities of America — like Chicago and Detroit — remember TV commercials for the first national tour of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Eyes were pulled from sitcoms and game shows.
Back then, the word “choreopoem” meant “closes Saturday” to most Broadway producers, if they knew the term at all. Defining characters by color — Lady in Yellow, Purple, Blue, Green, Brown, Orange, Red, while all being Black — was a radical move, as was imagining an archetypal character who could be divided up into seven facet of herself. And so was the overt poetry of Shange’s writing, overtly expressed as verse: “Bring her out to know herself/ to know you/ but sing her rhythms/ carin/ struggle/ hard times/ sing her song of life/ she’s been dead so long/ closed in silence so long/ she doesn’t know the sound/ of her own voice/ her infinite beauty.”
