78 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Leah C. Gardiner directs an ecstatic, bittersweet cabaret of black women’s voices.
THE THEATRE
PAST IS PRESENT
Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “for colored girls,” revived at the Public.
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY SONIA PULIDO
O
n the night I went to see the Pub
lic Theatre’s revival of “for col
ored girls who have considered sui
cide/when the rainbow is enuf,” it
happened to be the birthday of the
work’s author, Ntozake Shange, who
died last October. The audience learned
of this occasion just after the actors
took their bows. We’d already been
prodded into solemn joy, thrilled by
song and dance, and, toward the end
of the evening, ushered into the state
of bright, shattering anguish that the
play’s title promises will surely come.
As cheers and little sobs filled the air,
the performer Adrienne C. Moore in
formed us about the happy and slightly
disconcerting coincidence, and led us
in a moment of silence. Those ripe,
quiet seconds, with their intimation of
Shange’s presence through art, reca
pitulated a theme that had been build
ing all night, and which is intrinsic to
this ecstatic new production, directed
by Leah C. Gardiner. The past, this
show says, is not only usable but al
ways somewhere close at hand.
The characters in “for colored girls”
are a swarm of unnamed women, iden
tified only by the color each wears:
there’s Lady in Yellow (Moore), Lady
in Brown (Celia Chevalier), Lady in
Red ( Jayme Lawson), Lady in Blue
(Sasha Allen), Lady in Orange (Da
naya Esperanza), Lady in Green (Okwui
Okpokwasili), and Lady in Purple (Alex
andria Wailes). Their talking—some
times in quick, heartening exchanges,
but more often in monologues—and
singing and dancing and rigorous lis
tening make up the whole intensely
varied texture of the show. On their
bright dresses, the costume designer,
To n iLeslie James, has had printed pic
tures of the actors’ female relatives. Every
time one of the performers moves, the
audience gets a rippling invocation of
ancestry. The dresses reminded me of
the collagelike paintings of Njideka
Akunyili Crosby, which layer an emo
tionally ambiguous domestic present,
full of lonely kitchen tables and fraught
couches, over the vivid accompaniment
of public images—magazine covers,
iconic photographs—from the past.
B
orn in October, 1948, as Paulette
Williams, into a middleclass fam
ily of raceproud professionals (her
mother was a social worker and her fa
ther a surgeon), Shange was raised in
segregated but nonetheless multicul
tural North St. Louis—an early tem
plate, perhaps, for the diversity among
the women in “for colored girls.” They’re
from places as mutually remote as Ha
vana, Harlem, and Strasbourg, and their
locations in time are undefined; they
seem to have conjured up one another
in order to appear together onstage.
As a child, Shange was bused to a
largely white school, where she was
consistently harassed. As an under
graduate, she married an older man,
and, after the union quickly dissolved,
she attempted to take her own life
several times. Her novels, poems, and
dramatic works were created largely
under the influence of the Black Arts
Movement, which, despite its genu
inely liberationist leanings, could tilt
in a patriarchal direction, and some
times had trouble acknowledging the
offerings of the women in its ranks.
But Shange attempted to clear away
the larger culture’s static, and to let
black women’s voices transmit truly,
if not always plainly.
Those voices make it across in their
strange and unconstrained way at the
Public, where “for colored girls” first
débuted, in the summer of 1976. This
is a delicate work, a bittersweet cabaret
