Contains the text of the play, information about Shakespeare and his theatre, bibliography, key to famous lines, and explanatory notes.

First published in 1975, Shange's choreopoem has been read and performed because it truly revealed what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions of the dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. Back then she played the role of an alluring young girl but now she is being asked to step into the older role. With her assistant Maria prepares to play opposite a young Hollywood starlet and finds herself on the other side of the mirror, face to face with an unsettling reflection of herself.

Unmarried Lulu Bett can't question her role as chief cook and housekeeper in her married sister's home, but when a peripatetic brother-in-law comes to visit, he playfully proposes marriage. Lulu accepts, and the marriage soon reveals its underside, but not before she has tasted freedom.

Bridget is forty-something and single again after breaking up with Mark Darcy. She decides to focus on her job and surround herself with old friends and some new ones. But her love life takes a turn when she meets a dashing American named Jack. In an unlikely twist, Bridget finds herself pregnant but she can only be fifty percent sure of the father's identity.

Gloria is a free-spirited divorcee who spends her days at a straight-laced office job and her nights on the dance floor, joyfully letting loose at clubs around Los Angeles. After meeting Arnold on a night out, she finds herself thrust into an unexpected new romance, filled with both the joys of budding love and the complications of dating, identity, and family.

The Fowlers are a normal family in Maine. Matt is the town doctor and loves to fish, his wife, Ruth, is the school's choir leader, and their son, Frank, is home from his first year of college. Frank is in love with Natalie, a young mother who isn't quite divorced yet from her ex-husband, Richard Strout, whose family runs the local cannery. It makes Richard's blood run cold to see his wife running around with another man. And soon, an unthinkable...

Helen McCarter would seem to have it all. She's married to Charles who is one of Atlanta's most successful attorneys. But despite having wealth and prestige, things are not as they seem in the McCarter home. On the evening of their anniversary, Charles drops a bombshell on Helen-- he's divorcing her for another woman. Thrown out of the house with nowhere to go, Helen moves in with her grandmother Madea, a sassy woman with no shortage of opinions and...