Miller, Alexandria Wailes, Tendayi Kuumba, Okwui Okpokwasili, Amara Granderson, and Stacey Sargeant in for colored girls. Her pregnancy makes the impact all the greater.ĭ Woods, Kenita R. You can feel her pain as she transitions from the third person narrating the story to a shattering first person account of her children being in danger. Miller is shattering in her climactic monologue, recounting a devastatingly abusive relationship with a drug-addicted veteran (here is where the Vietnam allusion is updated). The company skillfully conveys the passion of the various ladies through limning and movement and casting directors Erica Jensen and Calleri Jensen Davis have assembled a fascinatingly diverse group.
Brown is also a trailblazer here as the first African-American woman to both direct and choreograph a Broadway show in over 60 years. Brown, who choreographed an earlier Off-Broadway revival at the Public, weaves in exuberant dance steps, some based on schoolyard games, others on Latin popular rhythms, along with intricate grouping and dramatic patterns. Ranging from an ecstatic high-school prom date to a shattering encounter with a crazed ex-lover, the monologues form a tapestry of pain, love, and community. The 90-minute piece combines poetry, dance and music as seven women, named for the colors of their costumes, share their experiences of oppression and resilience. Woods and Alexandria Wailes in for colored girls. Stacey Sargeant, Amara Granderson, Okwui Okpokwasili, Tendayi Kuumba, Kenita R. Brown celebrates the play’s spirit of sisterhood with joyous movement and magnificent acting. This new vibrant, energetic production from director-choreographer Camille A. (The first being Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.) Apart from changing a reference from Vietnam to Afghanistan, there has been no updating, but the issues of racism and sexism raised are still tragically relevant. In this theater season when African-American women playwrights such as Lynn Nottage, Dominique Morriseau, Antoinette Chinoye Nwandu, Aleshea Harris, and the late Alice Childress are receiving major productions of their work, it’s appropriate that we are also seeing the first Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.įirst produced in a women’s bar near Berkeley, California, then Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theater and the Public, and on Broadway at the Booth where the revival is now playing, for colored girls was only the second play by an African-American woman to open on the Main Stem.