For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf
There’s a marvelous show at Steppenwolf right now–a thrilling all-black production that fuses inventive poetry, tightly choreographed movement, evocative music, and sensitive visual design into a powerful, moving, politically committed work of theater.
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Controversial at the time it opened because of its anguished, scathing perspective on male-female relations in the black community, For Colored Girls is a landmark work of American theater–an uncompromisingly raw yet exquisitely poetic outpouring of what its opening lines proclaim to be “dark phrases of womanhood,” built around the theme of women’s need to love themselves before they can share their lives with men. Developed by poet Ntozake Shange and various collaborators in a cross-country series of performances in bars, cafes, and fringe theaters, it finally caught the attention of New York producers who brought it before increasingly “mainstream” audiences: the work marked a breakthrough for black and feminist theater in the mid-1970s. Without for a moment soft-pedaling such topics as rape, abortion, and domestic violence, Shange’s script transcends the victim-art genre that it helped spawn because of its dramatic specificity: the need for healing and self-affirmation is proclaimed in a series of crisply detailed, beautifully structured verse stories related by seven women who, while representing an archetypal “rainbow” of urban black womanhood, also emerge as sharply defined characters. The tales they tell chart their emotional evolution from childhood infatuations to adolescent sexual experimentation to troubled adult relationships–including failed affairs, abusive marriages, date rape, and finally a grim account of child murder as pertinent as (and far more vivid than) the reports of domestic atrocities that spill out of the newspapers each week.
It’s easy to see why director Eric Simonson invited Shange to write the script for Nomathemba, which Simonson conceived as a follow-up to The Song of Jacob Zulu, his 1992 collaboration with songwriter Joseph Shabalala. Based on a song Shabalala wrote for Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the ten-man a cappella vocal group he fronts, Nomathemba shares with For Colored Girls the theme of sexual betrayal and disappointment; and it aspires to a similar fusion of dance, music, and drama. Well, two out of three ain’t bad: Black Mambazo’s distinctive singing, with its haunting mix of dense bass tones and wonderfully airy high harmonies, is complemented by tightly choreographed unison dancing that emphasizes heavy stomping, high kicks, and fluttery outstretched arms. Simonson, a gifted director, has repeated what he accomplished in Jacob Zulu: he’s coached a disparate group of South African, New York, and Chicago performers into a seamless ensemble, who here explode in a series of joyous, colorful dance episodes staged by Shabalala, Chicago choreographer Kenny Ingram, and South African actor-dancer Dumisani Dlamini. The numerous passages of movement and music in Nomathemba are vastly entertaining, but they’re padding, not the crucial components they were in the much more powerful Jacob Zulu.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Michael Brasilow.
