Perceptions Play Club is a space where we come together virtually and in person to discuss plays we  have read by BIPOC playwrights. Join us every other month for a new play that you will read for the month then come to discuss it with us at the end of the month.

February's Play Club is For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

*Playwright, alfonzo kahlil will join us for the discussion.*

About For Colored Girls...:

From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come.

As a choreopoem, the piece is a series of 20 separate poems choreographed to music that weaves interconnected stories of love, empowerment, struggle and loss into a complex representation of sisterhood. The cast consists of seven nameless African-American women only identified by the colors they are assigned. They are the lady in red, lady in orange, lady in yellow, lady in green, lady in blue, lady in brown, and lady in purple. Subjects from rape, abandonment, abortion and domestic violence are tackled.

About Playwright: 

Ntozake Shange (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) was an American playwright and poet. As a Black Feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black Power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975). She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home. Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America,  and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced that it had acquired Shange's archive. She lived in Brooklyn, New York. Shange had one daughter, Savannah Shange.