The poetry of perception is not the same as the poetry of drama. In ""For Colored Girls," Ntozake Shange arranged her acid and lyrical perceptions into a fine, loose-jointed set of meditations and sketches.

They had the design and rhythm of a song-cycle; the pieces were funny, exuberant or acrid, and Miss Shange's remarkable poetic diction took the role of music in binding them together. Themes would appear and reappear, but a formal dramatic structure was not attempted or needed.

Miss Shange is something besides a poet but she is not—at least not at this stage—a dramatist. More than anything else, she is a troubadour. She declares her fertile vision of the love and pain between black women and black men in outbursts full of old malice and young cheerfulness. They are short outbursts, song-length; her characters are perceived in flashes, in illuminating vignettes.

Some of these things are found in "A Photograph; A Study of Cruelty," her second major work…. But the work is forced, and finally broken by its form. The perceptions are made to do the donkey-work of holding up what attempts to be a whole dramatic structure, and they fail.

The central character in "A Photograph" is Michael…. She is clearly the personage with whom the author identifies; she is how the black woman in America is to be, and the other, inevitably shadowy characters, are misleaders or mistakes.

Michael is a free and sovereign spirit, loving but unsubmissive to men, ambition or the pressures of American society….

She has settled … for Sean a photographer just on the brink of becoming rich and famous, and interviewed. It is his bitterness she loves, she says, but things are not so simple. Sean is surrounded by an array of tempters; all of them caricatures of how black people, as Miss Shange sees it, go wrong….

Sean is vital and talented, but weak. His confidence rests upon his success…. and his success rests upon his photography.

The play's creaky plot deals with the collapse of his selfesteem….

Everything, and every character, is really set up as a prop against which Michael can be wonderful….

It is a grave and captivating seer that Miss Shange has created. But she didn't need an unconvincing play as background….