Tyler Perry to Adapt, Direct For Colored Girls
Halle Berry, Angela Bassett Signed to Star in Ntozake Shange's Play
Sep 6, 2009
Tyler Perry, the actor/director and film and TV mogul, most famous for playing an overbearing yet hilarious, gun-toting grandmother named Madea, is adapting the 1975 groundbreaking play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf for the big screen.
The L.A. Times reported that Perry will produce, write and direct the film for Lionsgate, which plans to release the movie next year. Shooting is expected to begin in Novemer in Atlanta. The latest film by Perry, I Can Do Bad All by Myself, in which he appears as Madea, opens next weekend.
The play, written by Ntozake Shange, hit the headlines in 2008 when actress Whoopi Goldberg's planned revival on Broadway hit a stumbling block over financing. Goldberg has said major donors pulled out because they didn’t like the title.
"They said, 'We can't say for coloured girls or suicide - we certainly can't say them in the same sentence.' I was like, 'Did you not know this play?'"
Ntozake Shange’s Groundbreaking Poems
Shange's play is structured as a series of poems spoken by female characters, addressing issues of love, abandonment, rape, and abortion.?
An Emmy-nominated PBS television American Playhouse version of the play, which starred Shange, Lynn Whitfield and Alfre Woodard, was broadcast in 1982 and is available on DVD.
Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, to Star, Reports
According to a story in The Minnesota Spokesman-Reporter, Shange confirmed at a public appearance in Minnesota that three African American actresses had “signed contracts” confirming that they would star in the upcoming film: Oscar winner Halle Berry, Oscar nominee Angela Bassett, and Grammy winning singer-turned-actor Jill Scott.
Of her groundbreaking and yet controversial book, For Colored Girls…, Shange said: “I tried to do some things with language, I tried to do some things with relationships between men and women and women and women. And I tried to place a woman of color in the universe, which we very often are not the center of. But if we are women of color, we are the center of the universe, and I thought somebody should address that.”
Shange Authored Dozens of Plays
Shange has written more than a dozen plays and has more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Nappy Edges. She also has written a number of novels, including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Liliane and Betsey Brown.
“I have to create a world around [women of color in books, plays and poems],” Shange affirmed, “so that somebody who reads English somewhere can feel what it’s like to be a woman of color.”
