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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a 1975 stageplay by Ntozake Shange. First performed at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside of Berkeley, California, it was first produced in New York City at Studio Riobea in 1975; produced Off-Broadway at the Anspacher Public Theatre in 1976; and produced on Broadway at the Booth Theatre that same year. The play was made into a TV movie in 1982.

For Colored Girls brought to the stage a perspective on what it is to be female and black in the modern United States that many in the Civil Rights Movement era found groundbreaking, especially in the fact that it was, and has continued to be, done in mainstream American stage and media venues. According to Hilton Als in The New Yorker's Critic's Notebook (March 5, 2007), "...all sorts of people who might never have set foot in a Broadway house -- black nationalists, feminist separatists -- came to experience Shange's firebomb of a poem. ...[T]he disenfranchised heard a voice they could recognize, one that combined the trickster spirit of Richard Pryor with a kind of mournful blues."

Structurally, For Colored Girls is a series of twenty poems — referred to as a "choreopoem" — performed through a cast of nameless women, each known only by a color: Lady in Yellow, Lady in Purple, and so forth. The poems deal with love, abandonment, rape, and abortion. The performances of the nine actresses are equally focused on their specific stories; e.g., Lady in Green’s visceral account of a girl who chooses to abort her baby; Lady in Red’s horrifying tale of domestic abuse. The performances are sharp and bone-chilling. Shange's own name means “she who walks like a lion” in Zulu, and her writing doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to these hard-hitting issues. Her dealings with the hardships of physical and emotional abuse, the strength of unity, and the tragedy of loss have a focus and passion that has made the play and its incarnations last a generation.

The play has its moments of laughter and joy as well. Lady in Orange embodies the tenacity of youth as she runs away from home to live with Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture. And although the play expresses a certain dissatisfaction with the roles men have played in its characters’ lives, it transcends male-bashing and becomes a message of self-respect and reverence. The end of the play brings together all of the women for “a laying on of hands,” where Shange evokes the power of womanhood as the Lady in Brown begins the mantra “I found God in myself/ and I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.”

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