For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf

and Ntozake Shange, whose “choreopoem” For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976. Other well-received women playwrights included Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, and Wendy Wasserstein. In a series of plays that included Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984),

Her 1975 theatre piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf quickly brought her fame. Written for seven actors, For Colored Girls is a group of 20 poems on the power of Black women to survive in the face of despair and pain. The show…