Last night the Burton Taylor Studio hosted the packed-out premiere of a new student production of American feminist writer Ntozake Shange’s play or ‘choreopoem’ For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf. Through poetic monologues, combined with music and dance, the play tells the stories of seven unnamed women of colour. As the title hints, each of the women is identified by dressing in a different colour of the rainbow – with brown added in as a seventh colour –and also by association with various (mostly northern) US cities ‘outside’ of which each woman is located.

The programme warns that the play discusses ‘rape, suicide, abortion, violence, racism’ – which largely sums up the struggles that Shange highlights for us. That a play on the African-American experience written in the mid-1970s and only very lightly updated since then is still deeply relevant today tells you much of what you need to know about race relations in the contemporary US. Though, in fact, you’d have to concentrate to pick out examples of direct racial confrontation – it’s more that this is the background, the canvas on which the women’s experience is painted, or perhaps more accurately the frame that confines and isolates their particular experience.

White people literally play no role in the performance. So often when they (we) do – especially in film – narratives descend down the easy trope of the white saviour archetype. With an all-black, all-female cast, the play offers the audience no excuse not to relate directly to its characters. Shange makes sure to put both the bad and the good out in the open, which helps to universalise the experience and build empathy. Ultimately, redemption is found in self-acceptance and sisterly love.

For Colored Girls was the second ever play written by an African-American woman to be performed on Broadway, and was also adapted into a feature film in 2010. Its format of telling successive, loosely connected stories is enthralling, and I was not prepared for the play to end when it did. In no way did it detract from the work to be performed by amateurs. Their delivery was impressive and entirely non-hammed but instead authentic and unmediated. The Lady in Brown (played by Olaide Adejobi), for example, stood out with a deeply intense connection with the audience. Her prologue sets the tone of the play:

‘somebody/anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms …’

For Colored Girls is for everyone and runs until Saturday 9 June at the Burton Taylor Studio.