For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf a way that mimicked how real women speak so she could draw her readers' focus to the experience of reading and listening. In December 1974, Shange performed the first incarnation of her choreopoem with four other artists at a women's bar outside Berkeley, California. After moving to New York City, she continued work on "for colored girls...", which went on to open at the Booth Theatre in 1976, becoming the second play by a black woman to reach Broadway, preceded by Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" in 1959. Shange updated the original choreopoem in 2010, by adding the
A Raisin in the Sun a bombing. Her lines are employed as comic relief, but Hansberry also uses this scene to mock those who are too scared to stand up for their rights. In the introduction by Robert B. Nemiroff he writes that the scene is included in print because it draws attention away from a seemingly happy ending to a more violent reality inspired by Hansberry's own experiences. Experiences in this play echo a lawsuit ("Hansberry v. Lee", 311 U.S. 32 (1940)), to which the playwright Lorraine Hansberry's family was a party when they fought to have their day in court because a previous