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For colored girls who have
considered suicide, when the rainbow is not enuf
Annual English
Departmental Play of Jadavpur University: an informal and personal
critical
 When
the play was over, one of the boys replied on being queried, that
it was an uncomfortable play. Quick came the rejoinder that this
play was meant to make men uncomfortable. Well, it might have made
the concerned person uncomfortable, and as far as the girls are
concerned, they may think that dramas are supposed to make men
uncomfortable, but for my part I have different notions.
In spite of the literature courses
that has been my undoing for these last four years, my idea of drama
is sitting through an hour or two of relaxed entertainment. Needless
to say, the recipe ought to be shallow material, high on enjoyment
content, and should have lots and lots of spectacle. I am told by
the people who wrote the books that Shakespeare always wrote such
plays. And Shakespeare always had a knack of knowing what would suit
the paying public, and what would not. When plays were written which
tortured the brain, and badgered the conscience, at least care was
taken to compensate for these shortcomings by giving a handsome dose
of entertainment. I have never seen a Shaw on the stage, but I have
read quite a many, and all of them are gripping. Think of the
tragedy of the paying public who spends his hard-earned money on
going to a show and then getting slapped continuously for two hours
by haughty women. Literary history provides testimony that too much
experimentation has always been harder to digest.
Fortunately, the play that we went
to see had too much of spectacle. While of course, it would be
sexually incorrect to say that one saw spectacle in the play, but
this is one of those rare cases when the truth seems tempting. If
you haven't already guessed, the play is a Feministic outrage at
male social and sexual hegemony, discrimination and cruelty. It
would be presumptuous for me to say that I understood the play
properly, or that I paid any more than passing attention to the
dialogues which could have brought enlightenment, and so I would
desist the temptation of writing a critical on the play. I consider
myself far too incompetent. A play which is basically based in the
Negro world of America and which shows the female vision of their
society, is bound to seem somewhat alien, despite the director's
persistent attempts to make us see the parallels. And thus the
disclaimer in the very beginning which first puts the cast in their
original setting, and then casts them in an alien world (of course
having the big parallels that they were all female, and they were
the victims of male sexual brutality - the obvious point of the
play). See Director's note.
The play was outrageous on several
points. Of course the selection of the play had much to do with it.
It is a very stark play, and any television screening of the play
would be censored (thanks to some nice four letter words). The
costume of the female cast left nothing more to be desired (and as
I, a male, say these words, I am reminded that it is against this
sort of mentality and attitude that this play is directed.
Well, I feel flattered that someone should play such a nice play for
me), and as far as I was considered, my eyes hardly left two from
the cast (for reasons other than academic, and precisely why I saw
so little else of the play). And being a male who had nothing to do
with womankind except things romantic and considering myself
innocent on all sexual counts, I found it rather uncomfortable to be
at the receiving end of mad mouths of such beautiful girls. I was
rather lucky to have escaped the experiences of some guys who had to
face the wrath in the direct line of fire (the play involved direct
audience involvement so that certain lines of dialogues were
directed at individuals; they, of course, were selected
arbitrarily). However, as I found very little time to concentrate on
the script (myself being busy with an amusing activity not to be
disclosed in public domain), I escaped the discomfort to a large
extent. The gentleman beside me was livid. The play was not played
in a proscenium stage, but rather in an open round stage with
audience surrounding the cast all around at an arm's distance. While
this meant a certain amount of desired directness in the conveying
of the message, this raises a problem of how the play would be
staged in a proscenium stage. Here the cast stood or sat in a
circle, and delivered its speeches in all directions- and the availability
of the audience so close helped to make the audience more
uncomfortable. The script of the play was rather difficult in that
it contained many allusions and much connotations which is chiefly alien
to an Indian audience (I noticed it was only the professors who were
truly appreciating the script).
Much could be said about the theme
of the play, but why take up a hackneyed topic. This play provided a
very welcome respite in a very mundane academic career, and I must
thank the director for providing me something to remember, again for
reasons other than academic.
The cast and
crew
CAST
Lady in Brown: Shuktara Lal
Lady in Yellow: Rashmi Haider
Lady in Purple:
Sonali Roy Chowdhury
Lady in Red: Trina Nileena Banerjee
Lady in Green: Sunayana Roy
Lady in Blue: Nandini Das
Lady in Orange: Sudeshni Datta Chaudhuri
The Men: Indranil Mitra, Aniruddha Maitra,
Debsena Banerjee
CREW
Lighting: Abhijit Gupta, Anandi Ghose
Make-up: Rashmi Haider, Debjani Bhattacharyya
Stage Management: Anandi Ghose
Assistance: Sritama Halder, Ushasi Sen, Haimanti Basu
Workshops: Sohini Sengupta Halder
Choreography: Abhijit Gupta, Rashmi Haider
Direction: Ananda Lal
Music: Ananda Lal
Director’s
note
Given the academic debates within the department over the last few
years, everyone should understand why I am directing this play. It
came to me as a shock when I realized that, since 1994, I have made
our students perform mainly works by canonical authors. I feel
strongly now that they (and Kolkata audiences of English theatre)
need exposure to the much vaster range out there – not the same
old Shakespeare and Shaw, not stuck between Aeschylus and Brecht.
Our reactionary English syllabi refuse to grant adequate space to
recent, or non-British, literature. However, since the purpose of
these shows is educational theatre, I see it as one way by which I
can fulfill my duty of communicating about the real world and
artistic changes.
So, I rejected England
and crossed the Atlantic. There, I rejected conventional drama and
selected a different style altogether, what Shange subtitled a “a
choreopoem”. I rejected male authors, for even now most
playwrights are men. I rejected the American ethnic mainstream and
decided on the Black experience. Thus, I came to the play that made
Shange famous in 1976. For Colored Girls….has become
essential reading not only in American universities, but also in
gender studies and departments of English across the world. Yet,
whoever I mentioned it to here in the last few months had never
heard of it. Many visibly choked on Ntozake’s non-Anglo-Saxon
name.
Our production does not
aim to depict Black society or point fingers at its members. Hence I
did not emphasize realism to my cast. The acting is presentational.
For those of you who think the problems are someone else’s, I
offer the following statistics from Swayam, Kolkata: 50
percent of girls encounter sexual abuse in childhood; 85 percent of
women face harassment on the streets; 300 die every day owing to
improper care or violence during pregnancy.
Jadavpur
University
Department of English
Presents
Ntozake
Shange’s
For
colored girls who have considered suicide:
When the rainbow is enuf
Premiere: 4 December, 2001
 # Ntozake Shange: About the author
#
Critical of MIT Dramashop production(1999)
See scanned pic of the
review of the performance at USIS Calcutta. The review came in
Calcutta Times, TOI.
6 and 11 December, 2001
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