Having seen Ntozake Shange‘s For Colored Girls performed so many times I think I may hold the record for a dude born after 1980 who isn’t in the theater business. I absolutely love the piece, at some performances when Lady In Red finishes her monologue by saying ” “this note is attached to a plant/i’ve been waterin’ since the day i met you/you may water it/ yr damn self,” I’ve had to restrain myself from cheering like Prince Hakeem at a basketball game.
When I first heard Tyler Perry was going to be making Shange’s piece as a movie, I cringed, because I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly work. The non-drag women in Perry’s movies are constantly being humbled by their ambitions and aspirations, they don’t learn to love themselves so much as they learn their place. This is such a constant in his work as to make Perry’s effort to tell a story that is fundamentally about black women learning to love themselves in spite of a society and community that tells them they aren’t really worth it.
That said, this part of a scathing review from Variety Ta-Nehisi cited made me laugh:
The male characters other than Hill Harper‘s police detective are all sick cartoons, existing only to perpetuate horrors on the women. In Perry’s peculiar view, though, the women often collaborate in their victimhood. They invite the stranger into the home or let men stay when they clearly should go.
The male characters are sick cartoons in the original text. Beau Willie Brown was such a disgusting stereotype that George C. Wolfe felt obligated to lampoon the For Colored Girls‘ final scene in his satire The Colored Museum. The men in this play are for the most part, monsters. Even in high school, I never really found that to be a barrier to loving the piece–every gem has flaws. To the extent that the men are present only for the purpose of causing fleeting pleasure or terrible suffering, it may give a male viewer a slight inkling of what it’s like to be a woman and turn on your television.
