First performed by its author, Ntozake Shange, and four female friends in a Californian bar in 1974, this piece moved on to more mainstream theatreland and played over 740 performances on Broadway. Its impact today is possibly less contentious but its lifeblood is still fiery-hot.
Defining what the piece is isn’t straightforward. Shange dubbed it a “choreopoem”: a series of poetically charged monologues, some with songs and movement. She revisited it in 2010, adding segments on HIV testing, the Iraq War and crack cocaine. But essentially it’s still a piece for five actors, two of them doubling parts, each character nameless except for referencing a colour – “Lady in Yellow” etc, representing the seven shades in the rainbow.
Diane Page, director of the new production that is opening the revamped Yard theatre in Hackney Wick, has set it in the plainest of designs: no set or props, just the bricks of the back-wall, with moody lighting by Ali Hunter. The cast are in colour-coded costuming (Cat Fuller) ranging from athletic gear to disco finery; the mainly spectral electronic music is by Jammz, who also in one stretch of the score creates a soundtrack of violent rhythms and explosive beats that sound like gunshots, to which the women jerk and writhe.
Each character announces that she represents a major Black area of the US, from Harlem and New Orleans to St Louis, Chicago and LA. Scenes move chronologically from the women’s girlhoods in pre-civil rights days to their adulthood and the arrival of feminism and Aids in their lives. They face a now-familiar catalogue of socio-economic woes, from betrayal by their menfolk to what they term “rape by invitation” (where a dinner can be seen by a male friend as an entrée to sex, wanted or otherwise); from lack of job opportunities to blatant racial prejudice. Just as deleterious, they must square up to their own frail sense of self-worth.
Put that baldly, the piece may sound like a dirge, but miraculously it isn’t. Shange has woven the sounds of street-talk into her texts, undercutting its more rarefied diction and arcane conceits with displays of “attitude” and sass that can be as perky and amusing as they are sad. Often her verse-like script uses repeated refrains, rather like the chorus of a song. In one, the Lady in Blue – Nadine Higgin (pictured above), a great comic force with a belting soul voice – sings verses that explain how she "usedta live in the world”, but then she moved to Harlem, a pressure cooker of a place, “six blocks of cruelty piled up on itself”.
The initially naive Lady in Yellow/Green (Tatenda Matsvai) is given an even simpler number in which she complains over and over to her unseen lover that he took “all her stuff”, as if he has walked off with her stereo; but as the monologue moves on, its message becomes more plaintive and affecting, the stuff more obviously abstract and personal, building to: “And he doesn’t know he got it. Find your own things!” The mood then becomes overtly tragic when the Lady in Red (Cherrelle Skeete) recounts the story of Crystal, whose partner from teenage days enlisted and came home from Iraq with PTSD and a drug addiction. At the awful denouement, the other four women gather round to lay hands on the suffering woman.
As the hard-done-by stories stack up, the women’s stance starts to shift, from an almost insolent solitariness to an understanding of who they can turn to. Lady in Blue lives through dealing with her unwanted pregnancy alone, having refused to reveal it to anybody: “Nobody came, because nobody knew.” But as they move proudly and defiantly to more independent existences, at the same time they learn they can lean on each other, which they literally do, at one point in a vast heap of bodies, progressing from frantic solo dancing to unison ensembles. The rainbow as a coalition is stronger than any one colour on its own.
Much of this material was explosive in the 1970s, especially live in a theatre; now these are more commonplace themes on our screens and stages, though never outmoded ones. Despite the piece’s age, it still has the rawness and edginess of something created this year, and its insistence on the vitality of Black women’s lives has not lost its potency. Shange wasn’t alive to see it (she died in 2018), but in 2021 an all-male piece – for black boys who have considered suicide / when the hue gets too heavy, by Ryan Calais Cameron – took her template and presented the other side of the coin, as six young Black men explored the pressures of their 21st century lives, some ending tragically. Both productions have been graced with exceptional casts and creative teams.
- for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf at The Yard until 17 October
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