‘COLORED GIRLS’ PLANNED FOR SCR DEBUT : TROUPE HAS ROOTS IN HIT PLAY

“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” is an intensely evocative work with a special place in the Orange County Black Actors Theatre’s repertory.

It was eight years ago when members of a black women’s ensemble took the Ntozake Shange work on a successful tour in Orange County--a venture that led to the founding of the local Black Actors Theatre, still the only stage company of its kind in Orange County.

And it is the same stage work that the company will present at its debut engagement at the South Coast Repertory Theatre complex, beginning at 8 p.m. Friday. The two-weekend run at the 171-seat Second Stage in Costa Mesa ends Aug. 2.

Use of the prestigious SCR complex is a coup for the 60-member black company, which was formed in 1981 but is still financially struggling and without a permanent home.

“This collaboration with a highly regarded organization like the South Coast Rep is a tremendous boost for us,” said Adleane Hunter, founding executive director of the Santa Ana-based company of aspiring black actors, directors and designers.

The SCR connection actually dates back to 1982.

That year, SCR donated scenic and other materials to the black troupe, then known as the Inter-Cultural Performing Arts Committee, for the staging of “Trouble In Mind,” Alice Childress’ satire on racial stereotypes.

Two years later, the troupe was invited to perform at SCR’s “Arts on the Green” outdoor festival. The troupe staged numbers from its “Movin’ On” revue, including tributes to such famed black performers as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday.

When the Second Stage was offered last January, SCR’s producing artistic director, David Emmes, said the move was part of his organization’s “expanding commitment” to multicultural theater, a move that already included SCR’s Hispanic Playwrights Program.

Although SCR is not directly involved in producing or underwriting the “For Colored Girls” production, it is providing technical and other assistance to the Black Actors Theatre, as well as rent-free use of the Second Stage, Emmes said.

Hunter said her company has to raise $19,000 to stage it. Although the company has received $2,000 from the California Arts Council and $1,000 from the California Community Foundation, Hunter is counting mostly on revenues from ticket sales.

Shange’s work was always Hunter’s first choice for the SCR debut, she said.

“There was consideration of doing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ ’ (the Broadway revue based on Fats Waller’s music). But that would have been much too costly for us and, I think, not nearly as appropriate,” she said.

“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” first performed on Broadway in 1976, is based on Shange’s own turbulent search for her identities as a black and a woman.

Shange, a poet, has called her work a theater “choreo-poem” rather than a play. Interwoven with dance and music, it is a dramatic collage of growing-up experiences as told by several black women--incidents that range from great despair to triumphant discoveries of pride and kinship.

Hunter, who is directing the Black Actors Theatre production, was a member of the Good We Showed Up Players, the ensemble that performed “For Colored Girls” in 1979-80 at colleges in Orange and Los Angeles Counties and at the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center.

Three of the present eight-member cast are from Orange County: Regenia Wimbish, Estella Chambers and dancer Renda Pettis. The others, all from Los Angeles, are Robyn Hastings, Violette Winge, Eulynda Porter, Regina Herod and Zondra Ann Marshall.

None of the participants in this production see any real “mainstream breakthroughs” when it comes to casting black actors, despite the recent increase in Hollywood films and network TV shows that deal with blacks.

“Sure, it’s great that you have a Cosby on television or a ‘Soldier’s Story’ on Broadway and in Hollywood. But, by and large, it’s still the maid-level roles for most of us,” said Winge, a California Institute of Arts graduate.

“And when you do those kinds of (black) roles, it’s just like in the Townsend movie--they usually tell you to play it ‘blacker,’ ” she added.

She was referring to the audition sequence in Robert Townsend’s recent satirical film, “Hollywood Shuffle,” where black actors are urged to take on stereotypical “shuffle and jive” characteristics to land roles in Hollywood.

While Black Actors Theatre members say they find artistic refuge in such powerfully realistic works as “For Colored Girls,” they object to what they call the “black play label.”

“If blacks do a play, people are still going to call it ‘black theater’--which is just another stereotype,” said Marshall, who was a member of the earlier Good We Showed Up Players tour and is now managing director for the Black Actors Theatre.

“ ‘For Colored Girls’ isn’t just for black audiences. It touches us all with its pain, its revelations,” she said. “Its themes cut across all audiences. That was true in the 1970s when Shange wrote it. It’s even more true in the 1980s.”

A preview performance of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” will be given at 8 p.m. Thursdayat SCR’s Second Stage.

The regular SCR run will be Friday, Saturday and Sunday, July 30 and 31 , and Aug. 1 and 2. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and at 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Call (714) 957-4033 for ticket information.

The production will then be presented Aug. 8 and 9, and Aug. 15 and 16, at the Santa Ana City Hall Annex Auditorium, Ross Street and Santa Ana Boulevard. Performances are at 8 p.m. on Saturdays and 6:30 p.m. on Sundays. Call (714) 667-7090 .