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 was so low among white buyers that Mr. Hansberry may have been the only prospective purchaser available. Lorraine reflects upon the litigation in her book "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black": "Twenty-five years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house. ... My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white