The white lady took us. She gathered the kids who hung around her Village apartment and introduced us to the world of hip. It was 1977. I was sixteen. For the first time, we were being shown a world of unimpeachable cool not as it played itself out around St. Mark’s Place but on Broadway, at the Booth Theatre, in a “choreopoem” by Ntozake Shange called “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.” We had seen posters advertising the piece months before we headed to midtown; Shange’s face, as painted by Paul Davis, had been plastered around the city. We hadn’t seen a black girl’s body promoting anything literary since Kali published her book of poems, in 1970, at the enviable age of nine. You couldn’t have mistaken Shange, with her head scarf and multiple earrings, for a jive tastemaker; her style wasn’t very different from that of my four older sisters, who took African-dance classes and swore by “Back to Eden.” In fact, when I watched “for colored girls” (which has just been adapted for the screen, by Tyler Perry, with Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Kerry Washington, and Whoopi Goldberg in starring roles), I found it difficult to distinguish between her characters and the black women I knew. I had heard versions of Shange’s monologues before—whispered in my Brooklyn kitchen, late at night, far from the men who would be anatomized by their revelations.
But Shange would have none of that intrigue. As one of her characters shouts, “i will raise my voice / & scream & holler / & break things & race the engine / & tell all yr secrets bout yrself to yr face.” That call undid something in me. It shattered the Negro propriety I knew and lived by. The force of Shange’s writing seemed to say, “Fuck the old rule of not airing your female business in front of colored men, white people, let alone the rest of the world.” You own the copyright on your life. I can still hear the treble in the voice of one actress as she let the audience have it:
And when a character called lady in orange finally unleashed the sorrow she’d repressed during a relationship that she mourned even as it was happening—“i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time / it’s so redundant in the modern world,” she said—everyone in the audience became colored. We had all experienced a similar kind of grief; we had all been there. Watching the show was thrilling not only because of the daring that Shange brought to it but because the performance itself seemed to rise above what any one person had to offer. In other words, “for colored girls” was a complete work, with each of its elements—writing, acting, directing—dependent on the others. Here was my first experience of the enrapturing “magic” that the playwright and director Antonin Artaud had promised theatre could be.
Shange was born Paulette Williams, in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1948, the eldest of four high-achieving children. (Like Shange, her three siblings attended Ivy League schools.) Her father, Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon who treated a number of sports figures; her mother, Eloise, was a psychiatric social worker and an educator. When Shange was eight, the Williams clan relocated to St. Louis, a city that she would evoke with tender concern in her 1985 novel, “Betsey Brown.” Although Shange grew up in a large house with domestic help, her family lived a segregated life on Windermere Place in North St. Louis; their neighbors were other well-off nonwhites, whose ancestry stretched back to Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Japan. “We all had to live with each other because we couldn’t live with the white people,” Shange told the writer Serena Anderlini, in 1991. A gifted, bookish child during the tumultuous days of Brown v. Board of Education, Shange was bused to a formerly all-white school in St. Louis, where she was harassed and attacked by the other students. Still, she knew not to let the scars that she incurred there show. If she did, her tormentors would only have poured salt into the wounds. Plus, she’d be letting her race down.
The Williamses were what was then called “race people.” “Life was dedicated to the betterment of the race,” Shange said. So prominent were Shange’s parents among the Talented Tenth that W. E. B. Du Bois, who first popularized the term, once sang the infant Shange a lullaby and put her to sleep, according to family lore. Du Bois wasn’t the only notable black visitor to the Williams home. Among Shange’s parents’ friends were Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Robeson, and the musician Mongo Santamaría. “I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them,” Shange recalled in a 1987 interview. In high school, Shange began to write. She published some of her poetry in the Trenton High School magazine. (The family had returned to New Jersey when she was thirteen.) “It wasn’t until after the murder of Malcolm X that I realized that there was a rift in my home and a rift with my white teachers,” Shange told me. “I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me didn’t I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk. The others just sort of turned away from me in terms of friendship and support.” Shange stopped writing for a time, a response that wasn’t all that surprising, given that she grew up during the Cold War, when girls like her—girls with social standing—were brought up to be ladies: polite, helpful, silent. In a 1978 autobiographical poem, “resurrection of the daughter”—Shange prefers a lowercase alphabet, finding capitalization “boring”—she wrote:
Reading, however, remained a refuge. In a 1977 self-interview for Ms., she wrote, with her distinctive syntax, which visualized black English, “sometimes a langston hughes poem . . . waz the only safe place I cd find.”
Shange’s parents’ ambitions for her were the bourgeois ambitions of the time. “All I had to do was go to school, keep my virginity, and marry a doctor,” she told Anderlini. She enrolled at Barnard in 1966. (She majored in American Studies, and graduated with honors, in 1970.) At eighteen, she married an older law student, but the marriage unravelled while she was still an undergraduate. Shange unravelled with it. She attempted suicide several times: sticking her head in an oven, drinking chemicals, slashing her wrist, O.D.ing on Valium, and driving her car into the ocean. (It wasn’t clear until years later that her suicidal inclinations were in part the result of a bipolar disorder.) But, as with Sylvia Plath—whose rich emotionality and gargantuan theatricality were not unlike Shange’s—the despair also released her, at least as an artist. With no husband to accommodate, Shange was no longer obliged to hide her real self.
Shange threw herself into trying to understand how her sometimes painful and lonely past as a black girl had turned her into an alienated colored woman. Looking back at her life in “on becomin successful,” an early poem, Shange says, with understandable bitterness:
Her growing self-awareness dovetailed with the burgeoning feminist movement, but the cause that Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others spearheaded didn’t address many of Shange’s issues; most of the women in consciousness-raising groups were white, and Shange was becoming a new kind of race woman, an outspoken critic of the black bourgeoisie she had grown up in. When she was nineteen, Shange began working with the Young Lords, a largely Hispanic group fighting for housing and other rights in New York City. (She has said that she joined the Young Lords rather than the Black Panthers because equality for women was part of the Lords’ platform.)
Shange’s various internal schisms—the fact that, as a Barnard student, she was more entitled than many of the white girls she’d gone to school with, for instance—were not lost on her. “Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my Liberator magazine. The other two days I went to the Lycée Français to keep my French crisp,” she told me. “I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds. This continued until one of my floormates took some earrings and a dress from my room, and told me I had too much anyway. That’s when I realized there was something different about perceptions of me.” Eventually, she learned to put her divisions to use. To Anderlini, she said, “Some people might think that I am a ‘doctor’s daughter,’ and I have been privileged, true, but I also know how to get from Little Italy through Little Puerto Rico to midtown to where the ‘niggers’ are. By myself. Without getting killed.” Shange could talk “street” and “siddity.” She was the daughter that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man would never have imagined fathering.
In 1970, Shange enrolled at the University of Southern California to pursue a master’s degree in American Studies. There she met artists, writers, and performers, whose support helped usher her closer to self-expression. It was a banner year for a number of black women. Toni Morrison published her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” a chilling gothic tale about how white standards of beauty could drive black girls’ dreams underground. The poet and educator Sonia Sanchez published two volumes of poems about the black female body and its place in the revolution. The fiction writer Toni Cade Bambara edited a landmark anthology, “The Black Woman.”
Shange, although she had yet to garner public attention, was recording stories and dreams and observations that she would use in future work. And she was reading rapaciously. Her signature style as a writer would be an amalgamation of what she heard on the street, in her imagination, and on the page. In Claudia Tate’s 1983 book, “Black Women Writers at Work,” Shange explained her visual approach:
The poets LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Ishmael Reed were especially important to her, partly because they introduced “histories of people of color in their work from the very beginning,” she told me, and partly for the way their words spilled across the page. “I believe I am breathing with LeRoi Jones as he crafts the poem,” she said. (In her Ms. piece, she notes, “Some men are poets.”) It was around this time that Shange adopted a Zulu name, bestowed on her by two South African exiles: Ntozake means “She who comes with her own things,” and Shange “She who walks like a lion.”
After completing her master’s, in 1973, the twenty-four-year-old Shange moved to the Bay Area, where she taught humanities and women’s studies at several colleges. Putting down roots in Oakland, she met the Filipina writer Jessica Hagedorn at Third World Communications, a women-artists’ collective; she was introduced to the choreographer Paula Moss at dance classes conducted by Halifu Osumare. “We usedta call ourselves the COSMIC DU-WOP COMMUNE,” Shange wrote of her friends then, many of whom would contribute to the development of “for colored girls.” Shange had at last found her ideal audience. “It felt as though the men were not as interested in my work as the women,” she told me. “It was around this time that the Anaïs Nin diaries were discovered, as well as the true tragedy of Sylvia Plath and the reprinting of ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ ” by Zora Neale Hurston. “So there was a lot of excitement in the women’s community about the discovery of women’s heartfelt perceptions of reality. I felt the urgency of the moment to tell the long-untold stories of women.”
Teaching during the day, Shange wrote and performed her pieces at night, slowly developing a multi-genre style that she thought represented the complexity of black American art: Why just recite a poem? Why not support its musicality by having a musician play a piece behind you while you speak? And why not dance to a poem’s music as you go along? That year, Shange had another epiphany. Driving along Highway 101 one morning, she found herself passing beneath the arc of a double rainbow. Seeing the entire rainbow take shape above her, Shange realized that she wanted to live, that she had to live; she had something to say, not only about the fragility of her own existence but about the lives of the other colored girls she knew and loved and imagined. “In that moment of seeing the double rainbow,” she told me, “I felt connected to the delicacy and irrepressible majesty of life.”
Inspired by the lesbian poet Judy Grahn’s 1969 collection, “The Common Woman,” in the summer of 1974 Shange began writing a series of poems about seven nameless women, exploring the various trials that black women often confronted, from rape and abortion to domestic violence and child abuse. The first piece was called “one,” and is about a seductress who can be herself only in private. After making love to a pickup, the woman rises at four-thirty in the morning:
The title of the series was drawn from this poem. (Shange used the term “colored girls” because it was one that her beloved maternal grandmother would understand.) Soon Shange began to conceive of the group of poems as a “choreopoem,” a fusion of text, movement, and music. Paula Moss worked with her to choreograph the performance, and, by the winter of 1974, “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” had taken off. Shange and Moss performed it in bits and pieces in coffeehouses and bars and at Minnie’s Can-Do Club, in Fillmore. In her introduction to the published script, Shange writes, “The poets showed up for us, the dancers showed up for us, the women’s community showed up, & we were listed as a ‘must see’ in The Bay Guardian. Eight days after our last weekend at Minnie’s, Paula & I left to drive cross country to New York to do ‘the show’ as we called it, at the Studio Rivbea in New York.”
Things heated up in New York as rapidly as they had in California. Shortly after arriving, Shange met Oz Scott, a young stage manager for the Public Theatre, who was itching to get started as a director. The version of “for colored girls” that Scott saw had “no particular order,” he recalls in Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp’s book, “Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told,” which was published (after a two-decade delay) last year. When Shange performed the poems, she’d “change them however she felt. She would read, she’d get whatever improvisational avant-garde jazz group was there to back her up, and they’d improvise the dancing. It was a performance piece, not a play.” Despite her reservations—according to Scott, she told him, “I’ve never given any man any control over my life, period”—Shange knew that he had the passion and the skill to make the piece work as a whole. And the fierce actors he assembled—Trazana Beverley, Laurie Carlos, Risë Collins, Aku Kadogo, and Janet League (Moss and Shange also performed)—added their own sensibilities to the evolving drama.
During the next year, working closely with Shange, Scott helped give “for colored girls” a dramatic form, and two members of his crew suggested naming the seven women for the colors you would (or wouldn’t) find in a rainbow—lady in brown, lady in red, lady in yellow, and so on—so that their personalities would be more distinct. Finally, in December, 1975, Scott and Shange felt ready to present the piece to Scott’s boss, the legendary impresario Joseph Papp; Scott first gave the script to Papp’s wife, Gail, who worked as the director of play development for the New York Shakespeare Festival. “I couldn’t comprehend it,” Gail Papp said. “Then I looked at it and I saw it was all poetry, so I was all the more puzzled.” Scott arranged a viewing, and Gail Papp was overwhelmed. Her reaction presaged that of many women, white and black. “I was crying,” she said, “and I was kind of ashamed of crying, of people seeing me crying. It was so original and fresh, so powerful and beautiful. . . . It really knocked me out. And afterward I sort of gulped and dried my eyes and told Joe, ‘We have to do this. We have to do this.’ ” Papp read the script and asked to meet the author; his reaction was just the kind of instinctive recoil that Shange dissects in the play. “Out comes this funny, kind of tough-looking person,” he said. “She had an earring in her nose, a red bandana on her head, and didn’t even look me in the eye: a real picture of a young black revolutionary-type woman. ‘Boy,’ I thought, ‘she’s a tough one.’ ”
The play opened at the Public in June, 1976, with Shange, who was twenty-seven, playing lady in orange, and voicing aspects of her past. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Philip Hamburger, in this magazine, noted that Shange’s “unclassifiable creation” was “playing to somewhat stunned audiences” and praised its “mordantly witty, unpredictable, and disciplined” poetry. In the Times, Clive Barnes wrote, “Black sisterhood. That is what Ntozake Shange’s totally extraordinary and wonderful evening . . . is all about. It has those insights into life and living that make the theater such an incredible marketplace for the soul. And simply because it is about black women—not just blacks and not just women—it is a very humbling but inspiring thing for a white man to experience.”
The show transferred to Broadway that December and won the Obie Award for distinguished production the following year. While all the performers were memorable, it was Trazana Beverley, playing lady in red, who walked away with the honors (and a Best Actress Tony). Her mesmerizing voice—there was an oboe-like moan beneath every line she uttered—was only one aspect of her greatness; her imposing physical stature and her direct engagement with the audience simply defied you to forget her. In “Free for All,” Beverley recalls, “The audience response was always intense. Very, very, very intense. But I don’t think any of us thought the show would ever go to Broadway. This show? I very clearly remember turning to Laurie Carlos . . . and saying, ‘Laurie, what do you think they’re going to do with this?’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s probably too way-out for them,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ ” But Papp thought otherwise and invested in the Broadway production, at the Booth, where it ran for almost two years. Although it was, as Papp put it, “a rare kind of bird to be performing on Forty-fifth Street,” it was also a commercial success.
Like Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1956) and Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), the show was a fulfilling yet enervating family drama. Shange’s women were a community; in their shared isolation, they had found one another, just as Shange had found Hagedorn, Moss, and others in San Francisco. And while Shange’s work has been most often compared to Hansberry’s, for obvious reasons—both are often credited with bringing black audiences to Broadway; Hansberry’s play generated a film, a Broadway musical, and a television special—it bears a closer resemblance to O’Neill’s masterpiece, with all its reckless horrors, its humor, and its revelations of truth. Like Mary Tyrone’s grappling with her fierce maternal concerns and helplessness, lady in red’s monologue about her lover killing her children is one of the most devastating scenes about motherhood in modern theatre:
When the show moved to Broadway, Shange went with it. In short order, she was fielding multiple interview and autograph requests and stage offers. “I lost all sense of privacy,” she said. “I was constantly being sought after for money. And the vitriol that came my way from many who felt threatened by controversial aspects of ‘for colored girls’ was often frightening.” Reviewing the play in the black-owned Amsterdam News, Curtis E. Rodgers wrote, “In her unrelenting stereotyping of Black men as always ‘shucking’ and ‘jiving’ . . . [Shange], without realizing it, just as insistently caricatures Black women as being easily duped, and emotionally frivolous. This is so because Ms. Shange’s ‘colored girls’ invariably take up with those Black men whom she damns as mean and trifling.” Erskine Peters, writing in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, complained that Shange “portrays Black men basically as pasteboards or beasts.” Shange’s work was a particular target for black men, perhaps because she quite literally didn’t share the stage with them. Their willed absence from the universe she created served to reinforce what men of color already felt about themselves in the white world: they were invisible.
After three weeks of performing to packed houses at the Booth (about six thousand people a week attended the show), she got strep throat and left for Europe. “I retreated into the sanctuary of my writer’s world, often in foreign places,” Shange told me. “And I entertained a lot of lovers.” In the introduction to the published edition of “for colored girls,” she wrote that the Broadway production of the play was “either too big for my off-off Broadway taste, or too little for my exaggerated sense of freedom, held over from seven years of improvised poetry readings.”
Still, Joseph and Gail Papp didn’t allow Shange to leave the stage altogether. (Nor would the entertainment industry as a whole. Anxious for a bit of Shange’s female consciousness, television executives hired her in 1977 to work on a network special starring Diana Ross.) In 1979, the New York Shakespeare Festival staged Shange’s “spell #7,” which, like “for colored girls,” told stories through a series of voices—in this case, black actors discussing their methods of survival in the white-dominated theatre. Incorporating minstrelsy and dance, “spell #7” has a searing rant about the privileges that white women enjoy in a world where a black actress cannot “pass,” even as a character. The following year, at Joseph Papp’s prodding (Shange referred to him as her “art-daddy”), Shange adapted Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” also for the New York Shakespeare Festival. (The production, starring the intense Gloria Foster as an emancipated slave, hustling in post-Civil War Southwest Indian territory, won Shange an Obie.)
For the past thirty years, black, female, and queer playwrights ranging from Suzan-Lori Parks to David Adjmi have borrowed from Shange’s inventive forms. (Parks’s 1990 play, “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,” which features characters with such names as Black Woman with Fried Drumstick and Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, feels at least partly inspired by Shange, who, in 1981, built an entire piece around characters named Okra and Greens.) But in the interim Shange herself has become less and less of a presence on the stage. By working doggedly outside the mainstream, she has kept her convictions but lost some of her audience. Those who shun fame also sometimes shun posterity. “For colored girls” still places heart-pounding, outrageous demands on its readers; you have to live with the text as it lives. Indeed, the stories Shange tells in the play are socially and emotionally relevant enough for a showman like Tyler Perry to want to capitalize on them for a contemporary black audience. But Perry’s commercial impulses have little to do with Shange’s radicalism (she refers to her writing as “cultural aggression”). How likely are we to feel for lady in red and her losses when we’re busy watching Janet Jackson struggle to act from behind her perfectly applied lip gloss?
Ultimately, theatre is not exempt from fashion. By the mid-eighties, what Shange had done for black women onstage, gay playwrights, such as Larry Kramer, were doing for their own demographic, with work, like “The Normal Heart,” that dealt with the social devastation caused by AIDS. The American theatre can’t espouse too many causes at once, and the kind of support that Shange once relied on has drifted. Since the première of “for colored girls” on Broadway, Shange has published four novels—one earlier this year, six years after suffering a disabling stroke—and several poetry collections, all of which make use of her phantasmagorical style, finding gold in the mundane. But her feminist spirit is sometimes more didactic in prose than onstage. She is a spoken-word artist, first and foremost: she wants her language to live. Reading her post-“for colored girls” plays, one feels that what she has been lacking is a set of theatrical parents like Gail and Joseph Papp—parents who, aside from Shange’s own, could find their daughter’s difference a source of illumination that put audiences to work. ♦
