Shange’s impact resonates today
When Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf ” opened on Broadway in 1976, after a 1974 premiere at the East Bay lesbian bar the Bacchanal, the show tapped into a world that mainstream American theater hadn’t much acknowledged: the inner lives of women of color. The Chronicle’s New York correspondent Steve Gavin called the Broadway production — only the second play by an African American woman to make it to Broadway, after Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” — “a blazing explosion of life, of pain and torment, laughter and consolation, heightened by a scalding honesty.”
In September, when African-American Shakespeare Company produced the play, only a month before Shange died at age 70 on Oct. 27 in Maryland, the show felt just as radical. Its searing, wide-ranging portrait of black womanhood, expressed in a series of poetic monologues eschewing rules for punctuation, spelling and capitalization, still felt urgent in its fearlessness, its complexity.
That’s both a testament to the ongoing power of Shange’s writing and a call to action. Sherri Young, executive director of African-American Shakespeare, says that from the time she first encountered the text in high school till now, “the issues are the same. They haven’t been mastered. They haven’t been solved. They haven’t been healed.” Black women still aren’t seen or heard for their full humanity. “It seems like we’re going backwards,” Young says.
Though best known for “For Colored Girls,” which Shange called a “choreopoem,” Shange wrote a slew of plays, among them “Spell #7,” “From Okra to Greens/A Different Kind of Love Story” and “Three Views of Mt. Fuji,” the last of which Lorraine Hansberry Theatre premiered, in 1987. She also wrote novels, including “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo” and “Liliane,” excerpts of which Campo Santo performed at Intersection for the Arts in 2007, starring Shange’s daughter Savannah Shange.
Veteran Bay Area actor Margo Hall, discovering the author’s work as a high schooler in Detroit, was instantly drawn to the power of Shange’s writing. The first monologue Hall ever performed was from “For Colored Girls.”
“She was a pioneer in a lot of ways for that type of multidisciplinary theater. It wasn’t a straight play. It was poetry with movement.” Shange’s work reminded Hall of her own family.
According to author Gerald Nicosia, a friend of Shange’s who’s also working on a biography of her, Shange’s time in the Bay Area from late 1973 to early 1975 was essential in her development as an artist. During Shange’s second major stint in the Bay Area, from 2003 to 2007, her eyesight had declined, and Nicosia frequently drove her around.
What was most striking about her in person, he says, was that “she had no malice at all. She would always be ready to take the other person’s point of view.” No matter what you’d say about someone, she’d come back with, “Maybe they would do this because they were coming from this place.” Nicosia believes “that was part of her greatness as a writer, her ability to reach out and get inside other people.”