For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf will begin filming June 1

Tyler Perry’s tenth film for Lionsgate, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf, is scheduled to begin filming on June 1 in Atlanta.

Perry will direct his screen adaptation of the Obie Award winning play by Ntozake Shange and will produce alongside Paul Hall.

The film’s all-star cast includes Janet Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Jurnee Smollett, Kimberly Elise, Kerry Washington, Mariah Carey, Loretta Devine, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad, and Macy Gray.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf is scheduled for nationwide release on January 14, 2011.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a 1975 stageplay by Ntozake Shange. First performed at the Bacchanal, a woman’s bar outside of Berkeley, California, it was first produced in New York City at Studio Riobea in 1975; produced Off-Broadway at the Anspacher Public Theatre in 1976; and produced on Broadway at the Booth Theatre that same year.

The play was first published as a book in 1977 by Macmillan Publishing, followed by a Literary Guild edition in October 1977 and Bantam editions beginning in 1980.

A heavily edited version of the play was made into a TV movie in 1982 featuring Shange, actresses Laurie Carlos and Tony Award winner Trazana Beverly from the stage production, dancer Sarita Allen, and with early-career performances by Alfre Woodard and Lynn Whitfield.

According to Hilton Als in The New Yorker’s Critic’s Notebook (March 5, 2007), “…all sorts of people who might never have set foot in a Broadway house — black nationalists, feminist separatists — came to experience Shange’s firebomb of a poem. …[T]he disenfranchised heard a voice they could recognize, one that combined the trickster spirit of Richard Pryor with a kind of mournful blues.”

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Structurally, For Colored Girls is a series of 20 poems, referred collectively as a “choreopoem”, performed through a cast of nameless women, each known only by a color: “Lady in Yellow”, “Lady in Purple”, etc.. The poems deal with love, abandonment, rape, and abortion. The performances of the seven actresses are focused on their specific stories; i.e., Lady in Blue’s visceral account of a woman who chooses to have an abortion; and Lady in Red’s tale of domestic violence.

Lady in Brown embodies youthful determination as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. The end of the play brings together all of the women for “a laying on of hands,” where Shange evokes the power of womanhood as the Lady in Red begins the mantra “I found God in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.”