Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough: the generic malleability and accessibility of an ever-evolving multi-semiotic play

Abstract

This essay will explore the ways in which the generic fluidity of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough (1975) can be conceived of as a vehicle for accessibility within the creative industry. Mostly deriving from the choreopoem’s inherent multimodality as well as its intralingual and intersemiotic translations, the work’s transformative malleability will be analysed on the basis of an interdisciplinary theoretical model founded mainly on a semiotic approach. Simultaneously, the peculiar linguistic aspects of the work resulting in its innovative orality, on the one hand, and the distinctive forms of creativity entailed in all the different transpositions of the work – that is, its stage, television and film adaptations – will be underlined. The corpus that will constitute the focus of the present interpretative analysis consists of the recent stage transposition by the Public Theatre (2019) in New York, the 1982 PBS’s television adaptation directed by Oz Scott and the 2010 feature film written, produced and directed by Tyler Perry.