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A review by steveatwaywords
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Now I'm probably the last person reading this who could speak to its "authenticity," but this is the word that demands foregrounding. If there isn't always an aesthetic beauty to the words, the beauty comes from the raw experience, the natural tellings, the incantatory moments of recollection--let the aesthetics fall to the staging and dance.
Shange's stage production offers only the barest hints of what the staging might be--she lets the ensemble make decisions where it will--which is also a strength for the production and a minor weakness in the reading: we cannot see what is fully 1/3 or more of the production's meaning dramatized; nor do the words, obviously intended for oral performance, easily represent what a fine performer will do with them. The answer is simple enough: see it performed, and by more than one troupe. (This is easily done, btw, via YouTube for many smaller theaters; then, if you wish, watch the big-budget major-stars performance which is clearly beyond this book's original conception.)
Yes, the work is now more than 50 years old (how did that happen?), but for all of that, the truth of its stories changes--sadly--not at all. Shange has gone back from time to time and tweaked or added something to make it more contemporary (AIDS, for instance), but the experience of these black women--of black women--is openly timeless: as represented by the character Sechita, a goddess-like figure who resonates an idealized power though even she can be reduced to object for spectacle.
This is not a work for black women only, however. Despite the controversy some black men have raised about a "stereotypically brutal and sexist portrayal," the poems are for them as well, and for all women, and for anyone who looks upon a "colored girl" and too quickly . . . decides.
Shange's stage production offers only the barest hints of what the staging might be--she lets the ensemble make decisions where it will--which is also a strength for the production and a minor weakness in the reading: we cannot see what is fully 1/3 or more of the production's meaning dramatized; nor do the words, obviously intended for oral performance, easily represent what a fine performer will do with them. The answer is simple enough: see it performed, and by more than one troupe. (This is easily done, btw, via YouTube for many smaller theaters; then, if you wish, watch the big-budget major-stars performance which is clearly beyond this book's original conception.)
Yes, the work is now more than 50 years old (how did that happen?), but for all of that, the truth of its stories changes--sadly--not at all. Shange has gone back from time to time and tweaked or added something to make it more contemporary (AIDS, for instance), but the experience of these black women--of black women--is openly timeless: as represented by the character Sechita, a goddess-like figure who resonates an idealized power though even she can be reduced to object for spectacle.
This is not a work for black women only, however. Despite the controversy some black men have raised about a "stereotypically brutal and sexist portrayal," the poems are for them as well, and for all women, and for anyone who looks upon a "colored girl" and too quickly . . . decides.