The show’s movement has a fluid freedom that reminds me of a Shange line about a Sun Ra show from way back in “Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance,” her posthumously published book, “The drummers made me wanna take off my clothes and celebrate the world.” That’s how much Shange lived in her body, and so do the women in these poems.
While no actor takes off her clothes in “For Colored Girls,” Brown (who, by the way, interviewed Shange for that book) has a tangible, inside-out understanding of how movement is embedded in the play’s language. And as meticulous as Brown is about choreography and connection – replaced by silence and isolation in the poems of fear of the piece, with devastating effect – she is just as precise about textual clarity and depth.
So is the comedy, such as when Tendayi Kuumba’s Lady in Brown slips into the character of a bookish black 8-year-old who conjures an imaginary friend in the summer of 1955: Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture.
It’s a brilliantly funny interlude and a reminder that this child – bursting with intelligence and particularity, and already looking for like-minded people – deserves the world. That the world doesn’t cherish her the way it should is one of Shange’s main points about all the women in “For Colored Girls.” The piece thus has a lasting function as a source of comfort, confirmation and compassion.
When the Lady in Red (Kenita R. Miller, eight months pregnant and gorgeous in a peekaboo tummy tuck) says to a male lover who doesn’t deserve her, “I’m ending this affair,” her specified grievances have us thoroughly on her side — and then she lands a great punch line. These actors, all of them, are hilarious at deflating masculine attitudes.
Still, “For Colored Girls” hurts with the tension between the desire for commitment, the desire for sex, and the need for dignity. Also the precariousness of maintaining a sense of self – as the cranky Lady in Green (Okwui Okpokwasili) discovers, courtesy of “a lover I made too much room for”.
