✭✭✭✭✩
<b>by Ntozake Shange, directed by Djanet Sears
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
May 5-31, 2017
</b>
Lady in Yellow: “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma/ i havent conquered yet”
Some people might wonder whether a “play” from 1976 that is really a 90-minute-long plotless collection of poems holds up 41 years later. If we are speaking of <i>for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf</i> by Ntozake Shange, the answer is that it absolutely does. Shange has captured something essential about the experience of young black American women and this is clear from the passionate performances from all seven members of the cast under the insightful direction of Djanet Sears. Shange’s play is as vital now as it was then.
The play consists of twenty poems assigned to seven speakers who are identified in the text only according to the colour of the dress they wear. The seven thus form a kid of individualized chorus who act out their poems for the “colored girls” of the title. The seven move when they speak their lines, as the chorus in ancient Greek drama, so that Shange calls the play a “choreopoem”. For the Soulpepper production Jasmyn Fyffe and Vivine Scarlett have provided the highly varied choreography that ranges from uniform group movement to Latin ballroom dance to expressive modern dance. The choreography heightens the impact of every poem and is responsible for making the experience of <i>for colored girls</i> so theatrical. The performers also make their own music composed by Suba Sankaran humming, singing wordless notes in harmony, using their bodies as percussion instruments – all of which emphasizes the play’s theme of the growth of “colored girls” to self-sufficiency.
The choreopoem begins with a prologue by the Lady in Brown (Tamara Brown) who introduces all the other “ladies” and states the play’s mission outright: “somebody/ anybody / sing a black girl's song / bring her out / to know herself”. The performers then break into childhood games and songs as a sign of the innocence with which their life begins. This play segues into the next four poems all connected by love and dance. The Lady in Yellow (Karen Glave) tells how she lost her virginity after the graduation night dance. The Lady in Blue (Sate), half African-American, half Puerto Rican, tells how she danced only with Spanish speakers until she discovered the blues that spoke to her more strongly. The Lady in Red (d’bi.young anitafrika) delivers a comic speech about how she has nursed an unrequited passion for an unidentified other just as she has watered the plant that she is leaving as a sign of the love she is abandoning. The Lady in Orange (Evangelia Kambites) brings in a change of tone when she says, “we gotta dance to keep from cryin and dyin”.
The predominantly comic first section shifts from the idea of desiring male companionship to the abuse of that companionship. The laws are stacked against a woman who tries to claim that a friend, or husband, or relative raped her. This poem in turn leads to the the most terrifying section so far in the play when the Lady in Blue describes her conflicting emotions about having an abortion.
Having given us examples of the two extremes that woman can experience – love and desire on the one side, rape and abortion on the other – Shange then presents a a series of portraits of very different kinds of black women who together all help make up the “rainbow” of female black experience. There is the imagined Egyptian goddess Sechita described by the Lady in Purple (Ordena Stephens-Thompson) and imperiously embodied by the Lady in Orange (Evangelia Kambites). There is the scholarly eight-year-old Lady in Brown whose hero is Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), who led a slave revolt against the French to establish an independent Haiti until the rise of Napoleon. There is the self-possessed prostitute played by the Lady in Red, who knows exactly who she is and views what she does as work. There is the Woman in Blue unhappy that she has moved to Harlem because of the physical and social constraints she faces. And finally there is the Lady in Purple who is forced to realize that the man she loves is attracted to one of her best friends.
The next four poems are all about women in emotional pain after a beak-up in their relationship. This culminates in a wonderful section for the whole group where they reject male apologies, with comically accurate mimicking of different male stiles, and proclaim in a series of powerful statements all the qualities of their love that make it too great “to have it thrown back in my face”.
After this group realization the Lady in Green (Akosuma Amo-Adem), so far silent, finally speaks out in the most powerful speech of the evening, “somebody almost walked out wid alla my stuff”. The “stuff” in question is basically the woman’s identity and sense of self worth, and Amo-Adem sets the house on fire with the outraged pride of her delivery.
In 2010 Shange added two mode poems after the speech of the Lady in Green to deal with more contemporary subject matter. Both have to do with a woman injured because of the disease of her partner. In the first the Lady in Yellow leads a group of four in telling how she acquired AIDS because her partner would not admit that he also had sex with men.
In the second the Lady in Red tells the harrowing story of living with a man with post traumatic stress disorder following duty in Iraq who also won’t admit that anything is wrong. While the first of these stories is well integrated into what has gone before, the second story stands out as quite different. It is more clearly a narrative rather than an imagistic poem, and its critique is aimed not at the man in specific but at the government that undertook the war and does nothing for its veterans. This makes this final section far less specific to the experience of “colored girls” than anything else in the play. The narrative succeeds primarily because of the huge emotional investment d’bi.young anitafrika puts into it and how frighteningly well she conveys the horror of what becomes a tragedy for both the speaker and her partner.
After this the final choral “laying on of hands” is absolutely necessary to help us along with the Lady in Red calm down and to let the Lady in Red know that she is among sisters who will help support her burden.
Thus, though the “play” is actually a series of poems it follows a general emotional arc, tracing the lives of black women from innocence to experience, from dependence of men to independence, from feelings of worthlessness to a realization of empowerment. As a director Djanet Sears has managed this dramatic arc beautifully and has given more drama to the individual poems by having women who are not the speaker act the part of other women mentioned by the speaker.
One peculiarity of the play, even in its 1976 incarnation, is that Shange’s rainbow of possibilities never includes a female same-sex relationship. Her women are all subject to desire for and abuse from men, but Shange strangely never broaches the subject of desire for another woman even though a trailblazer and poet like Audre Lord (1934-92), who chronicled lesbian life in New York in the 1950s would have been known to her. Also, were Shange to update the play further, she would have to include the plague of shootings of black men by white policemen, a horrifically more common occurrence than incidents of PTSD.
In any case, <i>for colored girls</i> is a life-enhancing work that should expand the consciousness of any audience about the challenges that “colored girls” face. The entire cast shows the fiercest commitment and is uniformly outstanding. This a work more read and talked about than seen. Now Soulpepper has given us a chance to see it and see it you must.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) The cast of <i>for colored girls</i>, d’bi.young anitafrika in red;. Karen Glave, d’bi.young anitafrika, Ordena Stephens-Thompson, Akosuma Amo-Adem, Evangelia Kambites, Tamara Brown and Sate. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.soulpepper.ca">www.soulpepper.ca</a>.
<b>2017-05-12</b>
<b>for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf</b>