The Pickup's Arts & Culture coverage is supported by Brut Hotel, featuring a rooftop VIP after party for Tulsa Irish Fest on March 14.
World Stage Theatre Company: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf
World Stage Studios
February 27, 2026 (performances run through March 8)
I struggle to stay afloat in poetry. The aesthetics of words, the weaving of consonants and vowels to craft an impression or evoke a mood, the fact that there are rules but also there are no rules—it all makes me feel more adrift than ferried. The medium, done well, requires such naked vulnerability—which makes the act of reading or performing it intimate (or embarrassing, depending on who you ask). It’s not a genre I tend to seek out.
Because of this, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which opened at World Stage’s cozy black box this past weekend, felt intimidating at first, and not just because of the subject matter. The Tony-nominated 1976 play is an unflinching look into the experience of Black women in America. Instead of a traditional story with plot, the piece pulls together 22 of Shange’s poems, performed by a cast of seven women, each referred to in the script as “lady in (insert color here).” The poems are strung together with songs, music, and choreographed movement. It’s a type of storytelling that Shange named “the choreopoem,” with roots in Central and West African traditions and the work of women involved in the Black Arts Movement, making it unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a Tulsa stage.
This was apparent from the moment the show began, when Bebe Taylor and Karina Huft silenced the giddy opening night audience chatter with their commanding drums. The lights (designed by Celeste Vaughns) swelled and, two by two, the cast danced onto the stage, a joyful overture that set up the entrance of Lady in Brown (Dionne Lambert), who leads the show’s opening poem “dark phrases.” In true “Alex listens to poetry” fashion, I got lost at first searching for the narrative in the abstract, but Lambert’s raw performance pulled me into the moment, into the words, and left me in tears. We were just three minutes into the show.
The 90-minute one-act is filled with gripping performances that similarly arrested my attention. In “abortion cycle #1,” the quiet trepidation of Élle Evans as Lady in Blue grew into aching terror before lulling into a tense guilt that made me feel absolutely (and appropriately) nauseated. In a line about the procedure itself, the way she said “like soft ice cream cones” was haunting.