FAME CAME FAST WITH ‘FOR COLORED GIRLS’ : A LESS-PUBLIC OBIE WINNER WRITES ON

In 1976, Ntozake Shange got famous very fast. She wrote the play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”--and Shange, who up till then was enjoying modest success as a California-based feminist writer, was suddenly a world-class figure.

With a world-class work. Ten years later, the Obie Award-winning “Colored Girls” is still a vital--and very popular--play. (A new production, by the Orange County Black Actors Theatre, just opened at South Coast Repertory.)

But don’t look for its author in the audience. She gave birth to the project, stayed with it for three years--including a move to Broadway--then walked away. With no looking back, no bad feeling: “I was just through. Finished. I had to do something else.”

Something, she added, out of the public glare.

“I didn’t like that part of it,” the Houston-based writer said firmly. “When people on the street used to ask me if I was who I was, I’d say no, but that a lot of people thought I looked like her--so I could keep going. I wasn’t looking for (celebrity), I was looking to get my piece done. I’ve enjoyed the last few years more because I don’t have all of that: I can go to the laundromat, the supermarket, I can walk down the street, go on the subway--and nobody bothers me. Of course, I did like having the money. . . . “

Separating from “Colored Girls” also gave the St. Louis native the chance to concentrate on her other writing: To date, she’s produced three books of poetry and two novels and is at work on a third. Currently she’s in San Francisco, overseeing work on her latest play, “Three Views of Mt. Fuji,” which just completed a six-week run at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and will open in New York at New Dramatists in October.

“I feel good about this play,” noted Shange, 38. “It’s about a birthday party for a poet; all of his poet friends come and read their poems. It ends up being about sex and lust and Third World debt.” She laughed. “I write about themes that are going on in my mind, rather than actual events in my life. But I do know my subjects. I’ve traveled a lot--most of the places I write about I have been. I write about the Africa and America I know.”

The America she describes in the poems of “For Colored Girls” was translated to the stage as “seven women in different colored dresses on a square, raked stage--with a huge, embossed lace flower in the center. The action takes place from the four corners through a circle. Women come and go, run off and on, do their piece and interact with one another when it’s appropriate. They draw the audience into their own privacy. So it became one huge conversation with the audience and actresses, and the end of the evening was an embrace. At least that’s how it felt to me.”

But not to everyone. Shange recalls “a mammoth controversy when it first came out--which I never understood. There were these men who insisted that I had indicted all the men in the world, especially the black man.”

Similar to the flap over “The Color Purple”? “Exactly. Only it was 10 years ago, so it was even more insidious. I was younger and unknown, so they could be more vocal about their ridiculousness. And, of course, I took it harder.”

In spite of the occasional insult, “Colored Girls” clearly has longevity. Shange (educated at Barnard and USC Graduate School) believes it’s in the play’s ability to express “things that women don’t talk about--that need to be talked about. And there’s also something in the piece that allows us to feel like we’re revealing ourselves, that we’ve done something, contributed in one way or another.”

The revelation of self is something Shange sees in all her work.

“If there is a theme in my writing, it’s what it is to be of color and female in the 20th Century. I don’t sit down to write about that--it’s just what comes out. I can always rely on the fact that it’s going to be there.”

Yet the writing style, she acknowledges, “has changed over the years: It’s more intricate, less blatant, more personal. I seem to be having more fun doing it now than I used to. It’s gotten funnier.”

Like her? “Maybe that’s what it is. After all, you can’t be an angry young poet forever. It gets tiring.”