[Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf] is a comfortably loose-strung series of portraits and narratives about women, black women…. (p. 36)

Blisteringly funny, fragile, droll and funky, lyrical, git down stompish, the play celebrates survival. The portraits are not case studies of stunning wrecks hollering about paid dues and criminal overcharges. The pieces are not booze-based blues and ballads about lost love and missing teeth. The Shange brand of keepin' on does not spring from the foot-caught-in-the-trap-gnawin'-ankle-free-oh-my-god school of moaning. She celebrates the capacity to master pain and betrayals with wit, sister-sharing, reckless daring, and flight and forgetfulness if necessary. She celebrates most of all women's loyalties to women.

One of the best orchestrated pieces on that dodgy subject involves three players who weave in and out of each other's lines, laying out a history of relationships: embrace, recoil, regather, resolve. (pp. 36, 38)

What is curious about the work is that though men appear exclusively as instruments of pain, there is no venom, no resorting to a Queen of Hearts solution—Off with his head! No godlike revenge, no godlike forgiving. Hell, some things are unforgivable. The women of the various pieces suck their teeth, storm, sass, and get on with the miracle of living….

The "voice" of Colored/Rainbow defies and encourages theatrics. It contains a funkiness and a grand opera eloquence that we use when we self-consciously share pain. (p. 38)