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This group is for actresses, stage hands, make up artist and etc. who would like to produce their own version of Ntozake Shange's play For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf:A choreopoem

For Colored Girls is a series of twenty poems, referred collectively as a "choreopoem", performed through a cast of nameless women, each known only by a color: "Lady in Yellow", "Lady in Purple", etc.. The poems deal with love, abandonment, rape, and abortion. The performances of the nine actresses are focused on their specific stories; i.e., Lady in Red's visceral account of a woman who chooses to abort her baby; Lady in Brown horrifying tale of domestic abuse. Lady in Green embodies youthful determination as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. Although the play expresses a certain dissatisfaction with the roles men have played in its characters’ lives, it transcends bashing. The end of the play brings together all of the women for “a laying on of hands,” where Shange evokes the power of womanhood as the Lady in Brown begins the mantra “I found God in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.”

ABOUT THE PLAY:
In 1982, the play featured Shange along with Alfre Woodard and Lynn Whitfield. It was first performed at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside of Berkeley, California and later went to broadway.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ntozake Shange(pronounced en-to-zaki shong-gay) was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey on October 18, 1948. In 1971 she changed her name to Ntozake Shange which means "she who comes with her own things" and "she who walks like a lion" in Xhosa, the Zulu language.

In 1966 Shange enrolled at Barnard College and separated from her husband, a law student. She attempted suicide several times. Nonetheless, she graduated cum laude in American Studies in 1970 and entered the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, where she earned a master's degree in American Studies in 1973.

FOR MORE ON NTOZAKE SHANGE
www.myspace.com/ntozakeshange