LINES OF COLOURS

‘THE STAGING MAY BE STARK AND THE STORIES DARK, BUT THEY AREN’T GLOOMY’

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When The Rainbow is Enuf Soulpepper Young Centre, Toronto

“My love is too sanctified to have it thrown back in my face.” That’s the line that sticks in my memory from Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Not so much from the Soulpepper revival of this “choreopoem” as from its initial New York production in 1976, and not so much the line itself as the house’s response to it.

The audience was overwhelmingly black — something almost unheard of then on Broadway, where the play had transferred from the Public Theatre — and predominantly female. About halfway through it, the seven actresses who made up the cast came together in defiance. Each in turn had a word to describe why their love should not be abused, as it had habitually been; “sanctified” was just one of those keywords, and it didn’t seem to have been planned as a climax, but it was the one the audience joyously seized upon. They repeated it, passed it among themselves, in tones of incredulous delight. It was, I imagine, like being in church, but more so. They had come to the theatre, and it was speaking their language. I could not, as a white man, partake in the experience but I could appreciate and be gladdened by it.

Forty years have passed, and Toronto isn’t New York, and though in Djanet Sears’ Soulpepper production the sequence is still the evening’s turning-point. “Sanctified” itself is just another word, to be given no special emphasis by actors or audience — the latter being, at the performance I saw, the usual Toronto mix. The show itself actually makes more sense to me now and has more of a shape than it did then. Shange’s idiosyncratic title points the way. Its rejection of uppercase, and of approved spelling may be intended to annoy purists and pedants (like me, and it does) but more significant is its punctuation. That forward slash after “suicide” does the work of an intermission. The piece — it isn’t in any conventional terms a play — begins with solo complaints, laments, edging towards despair; it then rescues itself through affirmation and solidarity. The pattern has been obscured by new material that the author added some 25 years later but it’s still discernibly there.

The rainbow that’s “enuf” is personified in the seven performers themselves, identified as the Ladies in Brown, Yellow, Purple, Red, Green, Blue and Orange — so they’re “colored girls” in all sorts of senses. They have one another, in face of all the male world can do to them; the white world too, we assume, though whites in fact are hardly mentioned; black men are, though, and not for the most part flatteringly. Each of the seven women has a story to tell, the others helping out as needed; they make a great shifting chorus. The stories are mostly spoken, sometimes sung (music here by Suba Sankaran) and very often danced (Jasmyn Fyffe and Vivine Scarlett, choreographers); the ingredients are potently mixed under Sears’ direction, on a set (by Astrid Janson) that features a forbidding ramp and little else.

The staging may be stark and the stories dark, but they aren’t gloomy. In fact they’re full of wit. The Lady in Yellow (Karen Glave) tells of being the only virgin at her graduation dance, or at least at its beginning. (“You gave it up in a Buick?” “Yeah, it was wonderful.”) Brown (Tamara Brown) tells beguilingly of reading as a child about Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary, setting out to meet him a couple of centuries late, and encountering instead a present-day boy called Toussaint Jones. Purple (Ordena Stephens-Thompson) pays tribute to a goddess. Green (Akosua Amo-Adem) inveighs against the “somebody” who “walked out with all of my stuff.”

There’s a mordantly powerful group scene about the perils of bringing a sexual assault charge. Part of the original script, this actually rings more bells now than the updates/additions that Shange furnished in 2010. One of these concerns a woman whose boyfriend gives her AIDS; it’s certainly affecting but it feels dutiful, even anachronistic. It also takes a casebook approach that’s out of sync with the call-and-response structure of the show as a whole. Even more so is a scene about a woman whose lover, an Iraq war vet with PTSD, mortally threatens her and her two children. It’s a scarifying narrative, delivered — with the force of enactment rather than recollection — by d’bi. young. anitafrika (aka Lady in Red) who, as we know from Da Kink in My Hair and her own play BloodKlaat, is a past mistress at mesmerizing monologues. Those speeches, though, felt organic; this one feels imposed.

anitafrika, who outdoes her author in her disdain for uppercase, has some lighter material earlier on, comparing an unrequited love to an unwatered plant. Lady in Blue is SATE, who compensates by being ALL uppercase, and whose singing is an asset throughout, she plays a girl from Central America who comes to love the blues, thus providing an extra historical and even erotic dimension. The blues and black vaudeville thrived on songs for women celebrating sex: an explicit approach largely off limits to black male singers and altogether barred to white female ones. This may count as liberation or titillation: both probably.

My new favourite line belongs to the Lady in Orange (Evangelia Kambites): “I couldn’t stand being sorry and coloured at the same time; it’s so redundant in the modern world.” That’s a sentiment that crosses barriers. It might even beat being sanctified. Until May 31

CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN Djanet Sears’ Soulpepper production is a faithful rendering of how black women annunciate — in the form of a single word — why they should not be abused.