When African American writer Ntozake Shange's (born 1948) for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem appeared on the theater scene in New York City in 1975, i...
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Ntozake Shange summed up the central concerns of her art when she explained to an interviewer, "bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't yet conquered." In ...
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In the foreword to Three Pieces (1981), Ntozake Shange calls herself "a poet or writer/rather than a playwright." In doing so, she seeks to free herself from the constraints of conventional theater. S...
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Critical Essay by Toni Cade Bambara
[Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf] is a comfortably loose-strung series of portraits and narratives ab...
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Critical Essay by John Russell Taylor
[In For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,] Ntozake Shange sets out to evoke the plight of black women and at the same time someh...
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Critical Essay by Mel Gussow
Adaptations of classics are often based on a simple transfer in period; costumes and accents change, but almost everything else remains the same. In direct contrast, Ntoza...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Miss Shange was content to ruin one genre at a time, say poetry or drama. Now, [in Mother Courage and Her Children], she rewrites and makes ridiculous both American histor...
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Critical Essay by Frank Rich
The text of Miss Shange's "Mother Courage" … raises some troubling questions. What are an adapter's responsibilities to the original wor...
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Critical Essay by Carol P. Christ
A gutsy, down-to-earth poet, Ntozake Shange gives voice to the ordinary experiences of Black women in frank, simple, vivid language, telling the colored girl's...
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Critical Essay by Sandra Hollin Flowers
There are as many ways of looking at Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf as there are hues in a rai...
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Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
Good is good, theater is theater and Shange's work ["For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf"] is the kind the st...
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Critical Essay by Richard Eder
The poetry of perception is not the same as the poetry of drama. In ""For Colored Girls," Ntozake Shange arranged her acid and lyrical perceptions i...
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Critical Essay by Harriet Gilbert
[Ntozake] Shange's wit, her fierce anger, her sensuality and, most of all, her masterful, surprising use of language were of such potency that they bestrode, n...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Sharp
Ntozake Shange's latest musical work … is a workshop production, and it looks it. "Spell #7: A Geechee Quick Magic Trance Manual" is a f...
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Critical Essay by Don Nelsen
Ntozake Shange's "Spell #7" is black magic. It is a celebration of blackness, the joy and pride along with the horror of it. It is a shout, a cry, a b...
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Critical Essay by Richard Eder
Poetry is as contagious as poison ivy though less prevalent. Look at the response these days to the dramatic poems in Ntozake Shange's remarkable "Spell No...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Ntozake Shange, equally untalented as a poet and as a playwright, seems to have made it on the strength of being a black and a woman. Belonging to one formerly underprivil...
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Critical Essay by Michael S. Harper
Ntozake Shange's "Nappy Edges" is too long a book; there are far too many poems that borrow from and reflect upon popular culture without drama...
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In the following essay, Mitchell discusses Shange's choreopoem in terms of how it portrays an African American woman's perspective of the city.
Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for co...
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In the following review of Liliane, Neilen praises the structure of the novel, which interweaves the main character's therapy sessions with the perspectives of her friends and lovers. She empha...
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Woddis critiques a production of Ntozake Shange's play Spell No. 7 performed by the Women's Playhouse Trust.
Ntozake Shange is nothing if not controversial. It's not so much what ...
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In the following book review, White praises both Jamaica Kincaid's novel Annie John and Shange's novel Betsey Brown for their representations of young African American women.
So compleme...
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In the following interview, Lyons questions Shange about the various criticisms of her work that have been launched by feminists, and about her own perspective on the role of gender in her writing.
[L...
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In the following essay, Geis discusses Shange's use of language as an expression of African American women's experience in her performance pieces.
… bein alive & bein a woman...
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In the following essay, Waxman discusses the novels of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange in terms of the ways in which they incorporate dance forms and metaphors into their representati...
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In the following review of "I Live in Music," the reviewer emphasizes the musical elements of the poems and makes note of the "mixed-media art" by Bearden which complements...
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In the following review of Shange's novel Liliane, Elkind praises the way in which Shange, through her central character, "fleshes out … the complexities that Black women face in ...
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In the following review of Liliane, Sayers praises the collage structure of the narrative which combines conversations between Liliane and her psychotherapist with a first-person narrative by Liliane,...
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Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange
