For Colored Girls and The Colored Museum

The strongest link that I see between Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and August Wilson's The Colored Museum is that both of these plays challenge the idea of a formulaic black/African American play. Their dramatic forms stray so far from convention in language and structure that theyexpand the realm of possible expression for other black playwrights. Both of these plays also suceed in addressing social issues through their work so that their experiementation with theatre conventions is not so much for the sake of being avant-garde, but instead, an attempt to question archaic stereotypes, myths, and behvaviors in black communities by avoiding the use of traditional theatrical elements that may have locked these same ideas into black dramatic forms.
For Colored Girls abandons all rules of standard English grammar, punctuation, and spelling. In this refusal to abide by the rules, Shange gains the authority to empower women through their own language of sisterhood, pain and love. With so much power placed onto the page by Shange, the performances, I imagine, are like stepping into the emperor's clothes. Even when pieces deal with such painful subjects as abortion or reclusiveness or infanticide, the capacity to speak the pain, to purge and share with other women, takes away the power that silence gives to their oppressors. The voices of women that are heard in Shange's choreopoem are unlike many of the voices we have heard thus far in women's theatre, in that these women speak outside of existing only in support of men, whether they be mammies holding the black family together or the black woman concerned with her texture or skin tone in front of the male gaze. Shange says that all "colored" women shared a bond of sisterhood and those ties bind us and help heal us from the wounds of the world.
Wolfe does something very similar in The Colored Museum in that he deliberately satirizes tropes of black theater and history by creating "exhibits" that chronicle the shifting identities of black in the United States. Whereas Shange used her non-traditional form to empower women, Wolfe uses his to dramatize the importance of self-identification in black communities. Many of the exhibits are centered on African Americans who are denying, questioning, proclaiming, or unaware of their identity. What Wolfe also does is call attention to the formulaic nature of those "black gems" of American theatre such as Raisin in the Sun. Something else I find very interesting about The Colored Museum is how he uses the social codes of language within black communities to make it relevant to black audiences. He touches on very serious subjects but uses humor and wit to make it more comfortably acessible in performance. Ultimately, both of these works are great examples of the limits that can be pushed within black theatre.