IWU celebrates Black History with Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls”

MT. PLEASANT - 'This. This is for colored girls who have considered suicide but found the end to their own rainbows,” Shelia Payne, who played Lady in Brown in Iowa Wesleyan's production of Ntozake Shange's 'For Colored Girls,” said as she delivered the final line of the play with her hands clasped around the backs of her fellow castmates.

The production, put on in celebration of Black History Month, saw Payne, alongside IW students Taylor Powell, Desmonica Huffman, Sherell Kent, Symphony Copper, Tahnia Love and Taylor Payne, take on the roles of dynamic female characters. In the play, each woman shares her struggles and experiences through monologues, revealing to audiences shocking plot points including HIV positive test results and tragic deaths.

'That final line is very powerful. It showed that even through all of the situations, circumstances that these women have gone through, they still found a way to make it through and come out on top,” Payne said, 'The lines of literature itself are something that I think needed to be voiced and needed to be said. The fact that there are seven, eight different voices expressing what a lot of people feel - especially myself - it was great.”

Payne added that playing Lady in Brown was particularly powerful because she could relate to the character's experience with integration.

'It kind of hit home with me because of my situation as a child, going to an integrated school or school where my family was the only black family in the school,” she said.

Like Payne, Powell, who portrayed Lady in Orange, said the performance sends an important message about the experience of black women.

'I hope it shows what us as black women, some of the trials and tribulations that we go through. Even we're dealing with things that other people may have dealt with, there's a different process that we go through in dealing with those emotions because we are black women,” Powell said.

IW community members who attended the performance felt similarly about why it's important for productions like 'For Colored Girls” to be performed, specifically at a diverse campus like IW.

Lashawnda Roberts a class of 2019 alum and admissions counselor for the university, said the play is 'very intense” and the experiences portrayed in the production is 'almost sadly normal for black women.”

'It's something a lot of us have seen, at least bits of it, in our lives,” she explained.

Roberts said she's noticed Mt. Pleasant as a whole has become much more diverse since her freshman year, and educating people about Black History beyond what can be taught in books is an integral part of celebrating Black History Month.

'It's important to see more than just Black History facts. This is art done by black people. It's a history that not everyone gets to learn so we should take advantage of that privilege,” she said.

The event saw the support of several other alums of the university, including Amari Funderburg, who traveled from Chicago for the performance. Like Roberts, Funderburg pointed to the campus' growing diversity as even more reason to put on culturally diverse production like 'For Colored Girls.”

'In the last four, five years, the African American community on campus has definitely grown and I feel that it's important that every race is celebrated. The whole goal of this campus is to be diversified so something as simple as this, where we can broadcast [this play], it brings some light that we as colored girls go through,” she said.