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 underprivileged class is an advantage; to two, a gold mine. Further, she thrives on the gap between poetry and drama. Poetry publishers may just think that she has solid achievements as a dramatist; if the drama critics raved about her For Colored Girls …, it was partly because they labored under the delusion that anything so sprawling, pretentious, and bellyaching must be poetry.
Indeed, Miss Shange has never even managed to write a real play. A Photograph came nearest to being one, but was laughed right off the boards even by reviewers benighted enough to have extolled For Colored Girls. The current Spell #7 is every bit as bad as For Colored Girls, and though the cast is no longer all female, and the hatred of men not quite so obvious, the formula is the same: long monologues (occasionally dialogues, but nondramatic ones) recited or sung by a character or two, with the others intermittently chiming in—a directorial ruse meant to make recitation appear more theatrical. Dancing, too, is thrown in for the same purpose—with a dancer cavorting in front of a speaker, without any visible connection between the words and dance movements, except their shared triteness….
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