For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf Review
critic's choice
'For Colored Girls ' Review: Ntozake Shange's Women Suffer
The director Leah C. Gardiner delivers a warm and inspiriting revival of the landmark poetic drama, with a gloriously interdependent cast.
- For Colored Girls Who Take Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
- NYT Critic's Option
- Off Broadway, Verse Reading/Spoken Discussion , Drama , Play
- Endmost Date:
- Public Theater - Martinson Theater, 425 Lafayette St.
- 212-967-7555
Their individuality was always undeniable. But in their latest appearance on a New York stage, information technology'southward articulate that their combined strength is what has fabricated these women so vital, and then enduring.
There are, technically, seven title characters in "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf," Ntozake Shange's milestone work of theater from the mid- 197 0s. Simply in Leah C. Gardiner's loving, collective cover of a revival, which opened Tuesday at the Public Theater, seven also equals 1.
Such mathematics are of course essential to any ensemble performance, where interdependence is a given. Yet the team of actresses here, channeling what Shange called a choreopoem, takes onstage symbiosis to a radiant new level of both reliance and defiance.
Their lyrical soliloquies may find their characters in extremis. Merely don't ever think that they're helpless in their vulnerability. These women e'er, but always, have one another'southward backs.
And as you watch a show that begins tentatively but keeps swelling in confidence, you realize that their number isn't express to seven, or more than twice that, if you count the all-female creative team. Legions of unseen others stand backside them. That includes the many actresses who played these parts in earlier productions, the women who inspired their stories and the female person relatives of the bandage members, whose faces are printed on their dresses, created by Toni-Leslie James. And of course, Shange herself, who died a yr ago and who contained multitudes.
"Colored Girls" was one of the nearly unexpected theater hits to emerge from the chaotic 1970s. Get-go performed in bars and clubs, it found a more fixed home in New York'south Henry Street Settlement Theater, before moving to the Public Theater in 1976 then, in curt order, to Broadway, where it ran for 742 performances .
Mainstream theatergoers had seen nothing like information technology. Shange's free-form text was neither linear nor literal in its depiction of black women struggling to claim their own voices from a guild that had either ignored or actively silenced them. "Bein' alive and bein' a woman and bein' colored," as 1 character says, "is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet."
Often they spoke in lush and startling metaphors — about the confusions of girlhood, the salvation of music and, above all, the men who used and abused them — and moved with hypnotic urgency. ("We gotta dance to keep from dyin'," one says .) They were identified merely by the hues of the dresses they wore, as in Lady in Red and Lady in Purple. And the term "colored girls" was neatly sprung from any patronizing racial context.
Despite the rich specificity of its language, the play has proved surprisingly malleable in subsequent adaptations, which include a starry 2010 moving-picture show by Tyler Perry. The concluding fourth dimension I saw "Colored Girls" onstage — in 1995, with Shange directing — the palette of names had been changed (to shades like aqua and rose), and there were references to newly topical subjects, including AIDS.
Gardiner'due south version dispenses with those revisions. The text used hither rearranges some of the original material. Other poems by Shange take been added and set to sensuous music by Martha Redbone , hauntingly sung by the siren-voiced Sasha Allen, as the Lady in Blue.
But what'due south most striking near this incarnation, which is choreographed past Camille A. Brown , is its pervasive sense of women talking to — and beingness securely invested in — one another, every bit if in an eternal support group. It'due south a sensibility that starts with its round phase ( Myung Hee Cho did the set, lighting is by Jiyoun Chang ), which seems to exert a centripetal force, repeatedly pulling the performers into a single huddle.
Not that the course of the individual monologues has been jettisoned. Just while I remember "Colored Girls" as a series of vivid star turns, this version feels like an endlessly fluid collaboration. Some of the split pieces accept been divided, and so that more than one person speaks them — or in the case of the balletically graceful deaf extra Alexandria Wailes, signs them.
The individual narratives, many of which were fatigued from Shange's personal experiences, are ofttimes dense and elliptical in their imagery. And especially in the early sections, significant is sometimes muddled.
Other, later monologues land with an impact that shakes the business firm. Thursday ey inevitably include the harrowing, climactic piece about a young mother in a disastrously destructive human relationship (performed with scalding intensity by Jayme Lawson).
But I was also blown away past Okwui Okpokwasili 'southward declaration of independence to the unnamed lover who "about walked off wid alla my stuff." It's a great, trenchant piece of writing, irresistibly insistent in its repetitive accusations. But Okpokwasili knows simply how to calibrate its quickening cadences.
Image
Throughout, y'all're conscious of how all the performers — the others are Celia Chevalier, Danaya Esperanza and Adrienne C. Moore — are so completely there for the actress speaking. They snap their fingers and occasionally murmur in affirmation. If demand be, they'll step in to offering physical support , to prop upward another woman if she seems overwhelmed or drained.
They more or less enter dancing, by the way, in a prefatory passage that has them stretching their muscles, finding their grooves and loosely establishing a common physical vocabulary, as if in a workshop. It seems fitting that the bear witness's exhilarating high point isn't a single soliloquy but a nifty, luminous coalescing of everyone onstage.
This boisterous epiphany begins with one woman's declaration, "My love is too frail to take thrown back in my face." The others join in, with a panoply of adjectives that define the incalculable worth of their love: It's "too beautiful," "as well sanctified," "too magic" to ever be taken for granted.
Their voices meld, their bodies tumble and tangle together. And sisterhood becomes a unmarried hydra-headed, multitongued entity, invincible and indivisible. God help the human who dares to cross it.
For Colored Girls Who Take Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf
Tickets Through Dec. 1 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
soderstenblas1966.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/theater/for-colored-girls-review-ntozake-shange.html
0 Response to "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf Review"
Post a Comment