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 stage was created for. There is Ntozake Shange 1948– Photograph © 1982 by Jill Krementzno comparing the trust and presence of its power with any other kind of art in any other medium (nor any need or sense in comparison anyhow).

The show … [contains] the author's narratives, poems and dialogues, all designed to, in one way or another, "sing a black girl's song…. sing a song of life, she's been dead so long."

The overriding tone of these monologues is bitter but assertive, imbued with a new-discovered pride, reaching toward exultation. The anger is over time and pain wasted rather than an expected, indefinite continuation of it.

There is some lack of variety in the selection of material; an excess of concern with romance and...