The seven actresses, none of whom is professional, performed "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" at the Little Theatre over the weekend.

The play is Ntozake Shange's 1979 poetic ode to the struggles of black women with black men and the women's loyalty to each other.

It was Barbara Tinney's idea to put on the play. Tinney (pictured) is executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance, and said many teen girls are struggling with issues of friendship, romantic relationships, and violence, all of which are depicted through snappy monologues with a kind of Greek chorus response from the other players. She goes so far as to say she thinks the issues are even more urgent than when Shange confronted them in the late 1970s.

"The issues she dealt with are timeless issues and we know we have young girls who are struggling with relationship violence, who are challenged by friendships and boyfriends and self-discovery, so it just seemed timely."

"My hope was to engage some of the young girls we're working with through the Street Outreach Worker program, so that's where we started," Tinney said. "A number of them expressed an interest but they weren't able to follow through" with the rigorous four-day-a-week rehearsal schedule.

The Family Alliance is home to the Street Outreach Team, a group of men and women who have put their own run-ins with the criminal justice system behind them and are reaching out to the city's most at-risk youth. (Click here for a story on that.)

So the actresses who did wind up in the play "found us," she said. Two of them, Theodora Spencer, 16, and her sister, Oddie Spencer, 19 (pictured in blue and tan in the photo above), have a decade of theater experience with the Alliance Children's Theater. Brittney Graham (in yellow) also has some acting under her belt, but for the others in the ensemble (Angie Liana Laluz (in red), Arkayla Williams (in purple), Keyonna Crocett (in green) and Shanaire Saunders (in orange), the play was their acting debut.

One, Angie Liana Laluz, 16 (on left in photo) is the daughter of Kyisha Velazquez (on the right), a staffer at the Family Alliance and project coordinator for the Juvenile Review Board. When Velazquez was called up on stage at the end of the performance, the girls greeted her with wild applause and obvious affection.

It's that kind of relationship with adults that Tinney says is so critical. "It's a realization of possibilities. We believed in these young people, they believed in themselves, and the result was four wonderful performances."

Laluz ("Lady in Red") performed the most wrenching vignette of the play. She had engaged the audience so completely that when tragedy struck, a loud collective gasp escaped from dozens of lips. Asked afterward if that scene was hard to do over and over, she said, "Yeah, it was, because it's very touching and I'm a very emotional person, so, for me to come out and be strong through that part is really hard, 'cause people are still living through those situations." Click here to hear more.

Director Edi Jackson (pictured with the flowers she and all the girls were given after the performance) has been acting and directing youth theater for many years in New Haven. In the program booklet she wrote, "The youth are one of America's greatest natural resources. If we continue to ignore their voices and poison their minds, we will most definitely destroy the future of our country."

The audience was made up mostly of black women of all ages. While some said they had trouble hearing or understanding all the monologues (and perhaps were put off by some of the strong language), New Havener Beverly James (pictured) was impressed. She had seen the original play on Broadway and said when she heard it was being produced in New Haven, she had to come.

"It's an excellent play that unites women regardless of their age," she said, "because it does identify the struggles. I find myself watching it and reciting [the lines] because I have the book, I have the album, I have the poster, from 1979."

One young man in the audience, Jarod Greene, said he wasn't put off by the mostly negative light in which black men are portrayed in the play. "Bringing the issues to consciousness is important," he said, "whether they make us comfortable or not."

This quartet of women (left to right, Laura Lawrence, Carlah Esdaile-Bragg, Ramona Bryant and Kaye Harvey, with Barbara Tinney in the back) was part of the adult contingent that helped bring the play to fruition and support the teens' efforts.

Despite the acting chops on display, the young thespians have not set their sights on acting as a career. One, Shanaire Saunders (Lady in Orange), 15, wrote "she is looking forward to doing more acting." The others, according to the program notes, hope to pursue careers as "probation officer, doctor, community activist and poet, nurse, social worker, and teacher." Given their talent and passion, New Haven would benefit from many more opportunities to see these young women in action, as amateurs if not professionals.

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