Playwright influenced generation of writers
Ntozake Shange, a spoken-word artist who morphed into a playwright with her canonical play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” died on Saturday in Bowie, Md. She was 70.
Her death was confirmed by her sister Ifa Bayeza, who said she had been in fragile health since a pair of strokes more than a decade ago.
Only 27 years old when “For Colored Girls” opened in New York in 1976, Shange was a Broadway rarity on two counts: She was black and a woman. But her unconventional play was a hit and nominated for a Tony Award. A series of searing feminist monologues for seven black female characters named for the colors of the rainbow — Shange herself played the Lady in Orange — it inspired generations of playwrights coming up behind her.
Among them was the Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, who in an interview on Sunday spoke fondly of encountering Shange in September at a brunch for playwrights.
“I saw Ntozake enter the room,” Parks said, “and I stood up, and the younger playwrights said, ‘What’s the matter? Why are you standing?’ And I said, ‘The queen has just entered the room.’”
In her work, Shange was a champion of black women and girls, and in her trailblazing, she expanded the sense of what was possible for other black female artists.
When Shange (her full name is pronounced en-toh-ZAH-kee SHAHN-gay) first arrived in the American theater, though, the response was not uniformly reverent. “For Colored Girls” won admiring reviews and an Obie Award for a production at the Public Theater, before it moved to Broadway. But the play’s forthright, personal discussion of trauma and abuse experienced by black women was taken by some as an affront to black men.
“There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses,” Shange wrote decades later. “I was truly dumbfounded that I was right then and there deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin’, and not all women were in my corner, either.”
Born Paulette Williams on Oct. 18, 1948, in Trenton, N.J., she was the daughter of Dr. Paul T. Williams, a surgeon, and Eloise Owens Williams, a professor of social work. She adopted a Zulu name as a young woman.
Her family said she had been affected deeply by the civil rights movement and had later participated in the anti-war movement and efforts to advance the rights of women, Puerto Ricans and black artists.
Shange’s survivors include a daughter, Savannah Shange, and a granddaughter.