For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a 1975 stageplay by Ntozake Shange. First performed at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside of Berkeley, California, it was first produced in New York City at Studio Riobea in 1975; produced Off-Broadway at the Anspacher Public Theatre in 1976; and produced on Broadway at the Booth Theatre that same year. The play was made into a TV movie in 1982. 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ... Ntozake Shange (pronounced En-toe-ZAK-kay SHONG-gay) (born October 18, 1948) is an African American playwright, performance artist, and writer who is best-known for her Obie Award winning play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. ... Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in northern California, in the United States. ... New York, NY redirects here. ... Off-Broadway plays or musicals are performed in New York City in smaller theatres than Broadway, but larger than Off-Off-Broadway, productions. ... Broadway theatre[1] is the most prestigious form of professional theatre in the U.S., as well as the most well known to the general public and most lucrative for the performers, technicians and others involved in putting on the shows. ... The Booth Theatre in 2006 The Booth Theatre on September 25, 2005 The Booth Theatre is a legitimate Broadway theatre located at 222 West 45th Street in midtown-Manhattan. ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

For Colored Girls brought to the stage a perspective on what it is to be female and black in the modern United States that many in the Civil Rights Movement era found groundbreaking, especially in the fact that it was, and has continued to be, done in mainstream American stage and media venues. According to Hilton Als in The New Yorker's Critic's Notebook (March 5, 2007), "...all sorts of people who might never have set foot in a Broadway house -- black nationalists, feminist separatists -- came to experience Shange's firebomb of a poem. ...[T]he disenfranchised heard a voice they could recognize, one that combined the trickster spirit of Richard Pryor with a kind of mournful blues." Languages Predominantly American English Religions Protestantism (chiefly Baptist and Methodist); Roman Catholicism; Islam Related ethnic groups Sub-Saharan Africans and other African groups, some with Native American groups. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry and fiction. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Separatist feminism is a form of feminism that does not support heterosexual relationships due to a belief that sexual disparities between men and women are unresolvable. ... Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III (December 1, 1940 – December 10, 2005) was an American comedian, actor, and writer. ...

Structurally, For Colored Girls is a series of twenty poems — referred to as a "choreopoem" — performed through a cast of nameless women, each known only by a color: Lady in Yellow, Lady in Purple, and so forth. The poems deal with love, abandonment, rape, and abortion. The performances of the nine actresses are equally focused on their specific stories; e.g., Lady in Green’s visceral account of a girl who chooses to abort her baby; Lady in Red’s horrifying tale of domestic abuse. The performances are sharp and bone-chilling. Shange's own name means “she who walks like a lion” in Zulu, and her writing doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to these hard-hitting issues. Her dealings with the hardships of physical and emotional abuse, the strength of unity, and the tragedy of loss have a focus and passion that has made the play and its incarnations last a generation. Zulu (isiZulu in Zulu), is a language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority (over 95%) of whom live in South Africa. ...

The play has its moments of laughter and joy as well. Lady in Orange embodies the tenacity of youth as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. And although the play expresses a certain dissatisfaction with the roles men have played in its characters’ lives, it transcends male-bashing and becomes a message of self-respect and reverence. 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.” François-Dominique Toussaint LOuverture, also Toussaint Breda, Toussaint-Louverture (1743 - April 7, 1803) was one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution. ... In psychology, self-esteem or self-worth is a persons self-image at an emotional level; circumventing reason and logic. ...