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.”
Finally, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” is back on Broadway, part of a renaissance of overly neglected Black works this season. It opened Wednesday at the Booth Theatre.
I should stipulate I knew Shange, who died in 2018, for a while (we taught together for a few months about 20 years ago), and I thoroughly enjoyed her company. I was already of the view that this play was a masterful piece of writing, a work so layered with targeted poetry as to form a kind of manifesto of the unheard, one foot in Greek tragedy, one in ordinarily difficult American life.
The stakes of its subject matter are written right there in the title, as is what Shange saw as the solution.
Critics declare the continuing relevance of plays so often these days, it has become a cliche. Great feats of writing (as this one) always have continuing relevance because they mold to any modern situation, being as human behavior tends not to change as much as we think. It’s certainly true that a Black girl’s song now is sung and heard more often on Broadway and elsewhere in the creative output of this nation. But it rarely has been sung better than this. To say “Colored Girls” was a prescient work hardly does justice to the word .
How is this revival? Moving, for anyone fond of the play, partly because the director and choreographer, Camille A. Brown, has sought to expand the scope of the work, allowing to encompass gender fluidity and deafness. In other words, more people now get to sing its song, which is heartening and affirmative. It makes the audience feel like the text is alive and breathing.
As designed by Myung Hee Cho, the environment is simple; I’ve seen other productions of this show that have attempted more radical visual attempts at contextualization, to great effect, and there was, I think, a missed opportunity here to really probe what the world is now, the one wherein these women now step out and speak their truths.
I’d also argue that the revival is, at times, over pushed in performance.
That’s probably inevitable: we all now have to intensify our personal communication to overcome all of the noise in the soundscape, whether we admit it or not. But Shange’s language actually can do much of that work on its own, if allowed to do so. The best moments in this production, which features the performers Amara Granderson, Tendayi Kuumba, Kenita R. Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Stacey Sargeant, Alexandria Wailes and D Woods, are those when the words face forward, the speaker tells truths, and the lyrical beauty of the piece is allowed to soar, without apology. Pain and all.
That said, there are many rich and vibrant moments. It’s great to see this spectacular American piece of writing now reaching a new generation of Broadway theatergoers. Shange, who could and perhaps should have been poet laureate, deserves every last piece of applause.
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