‘Told It Like It Was’: Ntozake Shange’s Tales of Black Womanhood
Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” defied Broadway conventions when it opened at the Booth Theater on Sept. 15, 1976. An experimental “choreopoem” focusing on the lives of seven women of color, who are each named after colors of the rainbow, was revelatory and not something you might expect to find on a mainstream Broadway stage.
“At the time, Black actresses were still coming out of the stereotype framework of people looking at us and judging us,” Trezana Beverley, who won a Tony for her portrayal of Lady in Red, said during a recent Zoom interview. “Zake broke all those rules and we broke them with her. We were indeed the colors of the rainbow — that was what was so exciting about it.”
Monologues detailing loss, betrayal, violence and love are told poetically and combined with movement and music. Through a gentle touch, a soft embrace or an impromptu dance, the women comfort one another as a supportive collective.
“Ntozake had an extraordinary way of blending prose with poetry — the rhythms of her words and, of course, the incredible imagination, that she had in her storytelling,” Beverley said.
The show ran on Broadway for nearly two years, closing in July 1978 after a total of 742 performances (“Godspell,” which had opened in June 1976, only made it to 527). It became an instant classic and continues to inspire new generations of playwrights, including Aleshea Harris and Dominique Morisseau.
To fully appreciate Shange’s work, and what it means to have it return to Broadway this spring (in a production directed by the dancer and choreographer Camille A. Brown), it helps to explore the historical and cultural contexts that led to its original Broadway production in 1976.
From Poems to a Play
Shange began developing “For Colored Girls” in 1974 while living in the Bay Area, and performed it with the dancer Paula Moss at a bar called the Bacchanal.
“Whenever she read her poems, like at the Nuyorican Cafe years ago, she always had musical accompaniment,” Beverley recalled. “She always had a saxophonist, a flutist or a cellist, and she moved with her poems. She has a line in her poem, she says ‘music was like smack to me,’ and you knew it.”
She had found inspiration in the Black Women Writers’ Renaissance, which began to unfold around the time she graduated from Barnard College. In works like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Alice Walker’s “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” both published in 1970, the writers explored the specific ways Black women contend with racial and gendered violence.
And Shange had her own inner struggles. Her college journals reveal that she “tried to commit suicide,” said Kim F. Hall, the Lucyle Hook professor of English and a professor of Africana Studies at Barnard. “Go back to some of the early interviews. She talks about it very forthrightly,” she said, adding that the title of the play is not “an abstraction.”
All of this fed her poetry, and after spending several years on the West Coast for graduate school, she returned to New York and began to turn her poems into a play. And that’s when Ifa Bayeza, Shange’s sister, introduced her to the director Oz Scott.
“I directed right from the beginning,” Scott, 72, said. “We did it at DeMonte’s, the bar on the Lower East Side where we started it, and then we went to Henry Street [home of the New Federal Theater], then we went to the Public, and then we went to Broadway.”
Opening at the New Federal Theater
Before the show could move to Midtown from downtown, producers had to invest in an experimental new work. It’s not like there were many plays by Black women, with an all-Black female ensemble, having sustained runs on Broadway.
That’s when Woodie King Jr., founder of the New Federal Theater, came to see “For Colored Girls” at a bar. He was immediately drawn to the work. And he was especially drawn to the poem “Sorry,” Scott recalled. (“Sorry” details myriad excuses that women have heard from lovers to justify mistreatment.)
“I gave it to Laurie Carlos [one of the show’s original cast members] the night before,” Scott explained. “I said, ‘I need this poem in this place. Here’s the poem, memorize it for tomorrow.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Oz, are you crazy? I can’t.’”
“I said, ‘Laurie, don’t worry. Just memorize it,’” Scott recalled. “And so, we got to that spot, and she just went into it, and Woodie King was sitting there, and she just looked at Woodie, and she gave the whole poem to Woodie, and she was letter perfect.”
It was as if King were the “sorry” lover, sitting there and absorbing the women’s stories. “What propelled me to bring it to the New Federal Theater,” King, now 84, recalled, was that the “women in it were very beautiful and very Afrocentric.”
The cast continued to rehearse and eventually performed for Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater.
“I’d been working for Joe Papp,” Scott said. “I was stage managing ‘The Sun Always Shines for the Cool,’ Miguel Piñero’s play, and around seven o’clock when we’d finished rehearsal, I just scooted everybody out and would sneak the colored girls into the Public Theater and we would rehearse there. Somebody told me that Joe knew. And I said, ‘Joe doesn’t know.’ Joe knew.”
They showed Papp the work in a little space that Papp had turned into a movie theater, Scott said. Gail, Papp’s wife, was there and she cried. “She said, ‘You got to do this, Joe,’” Scott said. “And so, Joe said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it in this little 40 to 50 seat theater.’”
“I said, ‘You give me a theater, I’ll fill the space.’ So, Joe teamed up with Woodie, and we did it at Henry Street,” Scott said.
In the introduction to the 2010 published version of “For Colored Girls,” Shange described opening night at Henry Street as being “divine” with “supplicants flocking from everywhere.”
Beverley noted that “At the New Federal Theater, it was like we were at church. Sisters were falling out in the aisle, they were so energized and charged.”
After the shows, Beverley said: “We would see a sister in the shadows, and she would follow us down the street, and then she would say, ‘Can I say, can I say something to you?’ And they would say thank you. Thank you for telling my story.”
“You see,” she continued, “that’s one of the great impacts that the show had because it told the Black woman’s story. She told it like it was.”
Opening Night at the Public
With the move from Henry Street to the Public, the audience shifted from predominately Black to predominately white, and that continued to be the case when the production moved to the Booth Theater. Even with the growing size of the theaters, the work maintained its intimacy through its poetry, dance and music.
On June 2, 1976, opening night at the Public’s Anspacher Theater, the show was sold out. “Joe Papp said, ‘I want you to invite all your friends,’” Scott recalled. “And I said, ‘Joe, the play is sold out.’”
“He said, ‘Oz, tell your cast to invite all their friends,’” Scott said. “So, all our friends were out in the lobby of the Anspacher. And when the place was full. Joe said, ‘OK, bring all your friends, have them sit on the stairs.’” King was one of many to fill the stairs.
“They sat in the front on the stage. There was no room. And I said, ‘Joe, what about the fire marshal.’ He said, ‘Oz, the play is an hour and 15 minutes. By the time the fire marshal gets here, the play will be over.’”
“It was an absolute brilliant move,” Scott added, “because the energy in that room — you had the critics, they were all locked into that room, everybody was locked into that room. It was a magnetic night.”
In its move to Broadway, the cast was expanded to include understudies. “I was brought in to audition to replace Zake,” Seret Scott, 72, an original member of the Broadway cast, said in a telephone interview. (Shange also performed in the play, as the Lady in Orange.)
From the opening night on Broadway, the cast knew they had a hit. “You could hear ‘Oh!’ or ‘Mmm’ or somebody who would suddenly weep because it was too close,” Seret Scott said. “You could hear the comments. So that is how we knew we were embraced.”
The Show’s Legacy
Physical movement drives “the choreopoem.” Instead of completing the play, Shange’s work is meant to unfold through dance and changes to the poems. Sutton said, “Ntozake saw herself as a dancer who supported herself as a professional writer.”
He continued, “The chorepoem is driven by the poetry, but the poetry is danced and the poetry is accompanied in sound and the music. Putting all three of those elements together is very difficult.”
For the Broadway revival, he added, “Camille’s background as a choreographer and her experience in stage directing gives her the opportunity to realize the choreopoem.”
For the 2022 production, which begins previews April 1 and opens April 20, Brown will make her Broadway directorial debut; she is also choreographing the show. (Brown previously choreographed the Public’s 2019 revival of “For Colored Girls,” which was directed by Leah C. Gardiner.)
The show “provides me the space to really dive into what I do which is choreography, but also storytelling of the body,” Brown said in a telephone interview.
In executing her dual role, Brown will be drawing from her own work, specifically “BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play” and “Ink,” to find a physical language for Black girls and women to express their stories. “One of the lines in the work says, ‘sing a Black girl’s song,’ and that’s what it’s about,” Brown said. “What is the song for each of us — that anthem, that macro anthem that we all respond to but individually that speaks to us personally?”
Although Brown said she is committed to providing a healing space for women of color, she said she plans to build on that legacy as well. “I think it is easy for you to get trapped into a certain way that this show needs to be done,” Brown said. “We need to hit these markers. They need to say it this way, we need to make sure this happens. I had to get out of that. I was talking to a friend and she said, ‘This is an offering.’ It’s going to be my offering.”
