The women arrived on stage in colour, but none of them was simply a colour. There was Lady in Yellow. Lady in Purple. Lady in Red. Lady in Green. Each woman carried her own story, her own history, and her own way of making sense of a world that had not always been kind to her. Together, they formed the emotional centre of Coyi Theatre’s production of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, performed at the Eswatini Theatre Club on Thursday night.
For anyone walking into the theatre expecting a conventional play, Shange’s work offers something different. There is no neat beginning, middle and ending tying everything together. Instead, the women move between poetry, movement, music and monologue, revealing pieces of themselves as the performance unfolds. And it is in those pieces that the audience begins to recognise them.
The colours are not there simply to make the stage beautiful. They are the identities through which Shange originally allowed the women to exist. Rather than giving them traditional names, she gave them colours, creating a collective portrait of Black womanhood made up of different personalities, experiences and emotional landscapes.
Lady in Yellow, for example, is associated with youth, sexuality, friendship and the complicated process of growing into womanhood. Her story carries the excitement and recklessness of young women discovering themselves, but it also speaks to the consequences that can accompany that freedom. Her presence is part of the play’s wider examination of relationships between women and the ways young women navigate desire, expectations, and vulnerability.
Lady in Purple comes from another emotional place. Purple has traditionally carried associations with royalty, richness and complexity, and in Shange’s work the women are rarely presented as one-dimensional figures. Lady in Purple’s sections speak to the complicated relationship between desire, independence and the search for a life that feels whole. She is part of a group of women trying to understand what they want while confronting what they have been taught to accept.
Then there is Lady in Red, whose presence carries some of the production’s most recognisable themes of passion, sexuality, love and vulnerability. Red is a fitting colour for a woman whose experiences are tied to desire and the consequences that can come with giving oneself completely to another person.
Lady in Green brings another shade to the picture, with her story contributing to the play’s larger conversation about identity, relationships and the ways women experience themselves within a wider community. The colours create a visual language, but the women give that language its meaning.
That was particularly evident in the Eswatini production, where the performers did not simply recite Shange’s words. They inhabited them.
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There was flirtation in some moments, humour in others and a vulnerability that made the heavier sections difficult to sit through. The women could be playful one minute and deeply wounded the next. Their stories were not presented as a single definition of womanhood. Instead, the production allowed different experiences to exist alongside one another. That is perhaps why for colored girls has endured for so long.
The work was first developed by Shange in the 1970s, eventually moving to Broadway in 1976, where it became one of the most significant works of Black American theatre. Shange called it a “choreopoem”, bringing together poetry, dance, music and dramatic performance rather than following the conventions of a traditional stage play.
The Eswatini production also added another layer to the work by incorporating original choreopoems written and performed by Swazi actors. This meant the evening was not simply a recreation of an American theatre classic. The local performers were also allowed to respond to its themes through their own voices. The result was a conversation between two places and generations of Black women.
The original work was created from Shange’s observations of Black women’s lives in the United States, but the subjects it explores are not restricted to one geography. Love can still disappoint. Women can still struggle with how they are seen. Friendship can still become a place of refuge. Violence can still leave scars that are difficult to speak about. And healing can still begin with being believed.
A screen can create distance. Theatre does not always allow it. When one performer stopped to let a line settle, the room had to sit with it. When another moved across the stage, the audience followed her. When the women came together, their collective presence changed the energy of the room. That intimacy became one of the strongest features of the production.
The evening was presented by Coyi Theatre in collaboration with the United States Embassy in Eswatini and the Eswatini Theatre Club as part of the U.S. Embassy’s America 250 celebrations. The year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, giving the production another layer of cultural exchange between American theatre and Eswatini’s performing arts community.
For Coyi Theatre producer and co-founder Siyethemba Siye Dlamini, the production was also the culmination of six weeks of work. Dlamini welcomed the audience before the show and spoke about the journey of putting the production together, expressing her joy at finally seeing the cast and crew’s work reach the stage.
But her most important message was reserved for the women whose stories the production was ultimately created to reach.
“We see every woman in this country, every woman who has considered suicide, and we want you to know that you are enough. You are big dreamers, and eventually it gets okay, ” Dlamini told the audience. Those words sat naturally beside a production that spends much of its time examining what happens when women are made to feel that they are not enough.
The women in for colored girls are lovers, friends, mothers, daughters, dreamers and survivors. They make mistakes. They fall in love. They desire. They hurt. They laugh. They remember. They carry things they have not always been able to say out loud.
Lady in Yellow is not simply the young woman. Lady in Purple is not simply the woman searching for herself. Lady in Red is not simply the passionate woman. Each colour opens a door, but what lies behind it is much messier and much more human.
That is what made watching the performers on Thursday night so engaging. The audience was not being asked to choose which woman was right or wrong. It was being asked to listen. And there was plenty to listen to.
By the end of the performance, the women had moved through stories of love, sexuality, heartbreak, violence, loneliness, friendship and hope. The audience had laughed with them, sat in silence with them and, in some moments, appeared to recognise something familiar in their stories.
The colours may introduce the women, but their stories are what make them memorable.And on the Eswatini stage, those colours found new bodies, new voices and a new audience willing to listen.
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