Struggle, resilience and true Black representation are core ingredients of what makes Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” and Keith Antar Mason’s “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Homicide When the Streets Become Too Much.”
Morgan State University’s Theatre Arts program ran the two plays “For Black Boys” from Oct. 19 to 22 and “For Colored Girls,” from Oct. 26 to Oct. 29, respectively. Since the shows first premiered more than four decades ago, the themes in both of the productions still resonate in a new era of Black America.
“I definitely think this theme will resonate with the audience,” said Kendall Jones, an actress in “For Colored Girls.”
Said Jones, a senior theater major: “Despite whatever gender they are, male, female [or] other, it’s [a play] that everybody should hear and I know that our voices are normally silent.”
In “For Colored Girls,” Director Tylar Hinton kept the poems from the original production intact. Like Shange’s original choreopoem, each of the women in the play aligned with one of the seven colors in the rainbow and each color represented a different metropolitan area.
Throughout the play, several of the choreopoems touch on subjects such as coming of age, heartbreak, betrayal and the struggles of living as a woman in an urban environment.
“For Black Boys” follows the same beat. According to Gregory Towler Jr., Brother #3 in “For Black Boys,” the show touches on police brutality by emphasizing the value in Black personhood — showing them and their stories instead of as numbers in a statistic.
“With these themes, you’ll see [the cast members] go through that pain of what it’s like to be a number,” said Towler, a junior theater major. “You see, a lot of times, [Black Americans] are treated as numbers and nothing more than that — but there is also a huge theme that we as a people can overcome that and we can see ourselves as who we are created to be.”
Hinton and Morgan State Theatre manager Dwight R. B. Cook set both shows in spaces of social and economic success in the Black community: the hair salon and the barber shop. These settings made the plays even more engaging.
“I’ve set [For Black Boys] in a barbershop, which is a place where people gather together,” Cook said. “Especially because men get a chance to talk about their feelings and what they have gone through. The barbershop is a universal location where men can talk from their hearts. That’s what makes it poignant.”
What makes “For Colored Girls” and “For Black Boys” so unique are their timelessness. No matter the age or the era, its audience will see themselves in the show.
“For me, I took this role because I understand the depth and the need for the story to be told, especially in the original choreopoem that it was written in,” Jones said. “ I love to act and I want to definitely tell the story to challenge myself, while trying to see what I can learn about myself on the stage. I also hope the audience can see something in themselves too.”
