The Fairy Princess gets tired, her wings beat slower. Why does everything take a hashtag and a blog to get folks to do the right thing? A great playwright passed last week and thus far, nothing has been announced to honor her, the way we of The Broadway, typically note the individual contributions, ie: Dimming the Marquee Lights.
TFP gets why the fact that when playwright, Ntozake Shange passed, people would be confused that no plans have been announced to dim the Broadway marquees in her honor. She was the second woman of color, after Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin In the Sun”, to have a play on Broadway.
Her play, “For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf’ premiered Off Broadway, then went to The Public, won an OBIE, and then transferred to Broadway in 1976.
Ms. Shange was 27 years old. Read that again, she was twenty seven years old.
It was a hit, and it was nominated for a TONY Award.
TONY Award Nominations do not just go to everyone – they go to outstanding examples in the category – performance, writing, lighting, costume design – the best.
Year after year, we see lauded names compete with neophytes, and every year, the prestige and unquantifiable cachè of being a Nominee elevates the individual – but in terms of playwrighting, it elevates the message.
Her message was ‘listen to Black Women’.
Ms. Shange elevated the voices of those who had never been put forth in such a way – and the fact that she played one of the characters in her own TONY Nominated piece?
That she WAS the “Lady in Orange” – took her success to a whole other level.
She was the holder of a Masters Degree in American Studies from USC, also a graduate of Barnard College, who had become deeply moved by the Civil Rights movement and changed her name from Paulette Williams to the Zulu, Ntozake as a young woman.
She not only wrote the story of Black women who had suffered abuse and trauma, but she performed it, night after night. Her play later became a film by Tyler Perry, so that it was more accessible to a wider audience, although it remains a staple in the regional theater.
That was not all she did. She was PROLIFIC on a Hamilton-esque scale.
She was what it meant to ‘not throw away your shot’.
That there was one play, one TONY Nominated play of hers that made it to Broadway is not to be a ‘qualifier’ of her place in Broadway history.
We honor individual accomplishments on Broadway. Which is why the lights should dim for her. The lights should dim because her legacy is living right now on our stages in other works by other playwrights.
The world of the playwright has always been systemically tilted towards writers of other, paler melanin. Towards men. Should someone choose to produce one of her other works on Broadway, that play might also be nominated or win a TONY Award. We do not know why there was only one that made it to Broadway – although systemic bias towards both People of Color and Women may have played a part – but the one that DID make it – was glorious.
Dim the lights for Ntozake Shange because she held up a glorious rainbow bridge for Black Women in this country to be heard and seen in a art form that did not resemble her.
That largely, still, does not resemble many of us.
Dim the Lights because a Great Artist has passed, and because in honoring her, we acknowledge that there has and will continue to be more to her legacy than a TONY Nominated Play that she wrote and performed in. She led a life doused in art and activism, and isn’t that what the best of theater is?
She was what the best of theater, is.
Come on, Broadway League, come ON!
Rest in Power, Ntozake Shange.
REST in POWER.
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