On Q Productions

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered When The Rainbow is enuf.

A SASSY MINT RAINBOW

By Perry Tannenbaum

If you saw the crowd at Levine Museum on MLK Day swelling out onto 7th Street , you may already know that the overflow queue was for "Q" – Quentin Talley and his new On Q Productions. With a free presentation of Douglas T. Ward's A Day of Absence, a new day was born in the Queen City . Crowd control may have been a work-in-progress, but the concept was an instant hit.

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Talley's success was underscored last weekend when he had to add an extra Sunday matinee to the run of his latest exploit, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. This was out in Commuterland, far from the mighty Lynx, at the Mint Museum -- proving that the Q concept has legs and his followers have wheels. considered suicide...

For a Thursday evening miles from the launching pad of ACC March Madness, it was a fairly healthy walk for Sue and me from the Mint parking lot to the lobby. A good 20 minutes before the 8 p.m. start, only scattered seats remained. When a horseshoe of extra seats was plunked right in front of our front row, we scrambled forward to protect our sightline.

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The On Q cast seemed admirably oblivious to this constriction of their performing space. While the candy-colored costumes and lighting made them look like girls as they descended to the stage, their celebration of Ntozake Shange's text -- spiced with extended interludes of sass, seduction and brutal melodrama -- clearly made the point that these were ladies, each one of them a handful.
is enuf.

In fact, the maturity of the actresses and the silken design and production values were what elevated this Colored Girls above the pathfinding JC Smith production of 1988. Talley had his own way with the script, dropping an innocent 11-year-old rainbow, Zelyn Valdes, into the vortex of mature colored girls who swirled around her. Leah Palmer-Licht as Lady in Purple was the most wanton of our urban griots, unwinding the various escapades of "Sechita." LeShea Stukes certainly was the most emotional as Lady in Red, relating the sensational tale of the deranged father in "No Air."

Anysia Welsh was suitably juvenile and coquettish as Lady in Brown, spinning the "Toussaint" reminiscence, while Zorana Valdes widened the overall palette as Lady in Orange , celebrating salsa and Willie Colon. Somebody had to pick up the short straw and portray the virginal Lady in Yellow of "Graduation Night," and Winthrop grad Kimberly Johnson excelled in her Charlotte debut.

Janalyn Moonie-Walton and Regina Davis, as Ladies in Blue and Green, added zest to the incantatory choreopoems. Moonie-Walton, memorable on film in brother Jeff's Donor documentary, brought a cynical edge to "Then I Moved to Harlem," while Davis perfectly calibrated her outraged attitude for "Somebody Almost Walked Off With My Stuff."

There's an On Q original scheduled on April 19 at Duke Power Theater, Miles & Coltrane: Blue(.). On the strength of For Colored Girls, I'm predicting it will be a tough ticket -- even if it isn't free.