Award-winning writer Shange dies at age 70
Acclaimed as dramatist, she penned wide oeuvre
NEW YORK — Playwright, poet and author Ntozake Shange, whose most acclaimed theater piece is the 1975 Tony Award-nominated play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/when the Rainbow is Enuf,” died Saturday, according to her daughter. She was 70.
Shange’s “For Colored Girls” describes the racism, sexism, violence and rape experienced by seven black women. It has been influential to generations of progressive thinkers, from #Metoo architect Tarana Burke to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. After learning of Shange’s death, Nottage called her “our warrior poet/dramatist.”
Savannah Shange, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said Saturday that her mother had died in her sleep at an assisted living facility in Bowie, Maryland.
Shange used idiosyncratic punctuation and nonstandard spellings in her work, challenging conventions.
“For Colored Girls” played some 750 performances on Broadway — it was only the second play by an African-american woman, after “A Raisin in the Sun” — and was turned into a feature film by Tyler Perry.
Born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, she went on to graduate from Barnard College and got a master’s degree from the University of Southern California. Her father, Dr. Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon. Her mother, Eloise Owens Williams, was a professor of social work. She later assumed a new Zulu name: Ntozake means “She who comes with her own things” and Shange means “She who walks like a lion.”
“For Colored Girls” opened at the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, with Shange, then 27, performing as one of the women.
The New York Times reviewer called it “extraordinary and wonderful” and “a very humbling but inspiring thing for a white man to experience.” It earned Shange an Obie Award, and she won a second such award in 1981 for her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” at the Public Theater.