Theatre in the X returns to Malcolm X Park this week with four free performances of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, staging the Obie Award-winning choreopoem starting Thursday at 7 p.m. and running through Sunday. The production, directed by Cheyenne Barboza, arrives during the piece's 50th anniversary year and marks a deliberate shift in tone for the West Philadelphia theater company after last summer's all-male production in the same park.
A Free Community Staple Turns to Sisterhood
According to West Philly Local, the performances are set for Thursday, August 20 at 7 p.m., Friday, August 21 at 7 p.m., and Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23 at 5 p.m., all at Malcolm X Park. The cast includes Francine Emefa Tamakloe as the Lady in Green, Sabrina Winford as the Lady in Yellow, M. Anastasia Robinson as the Lady in Purple, Rahnda Rize as the Lady in Red, Casandra Kay as the Lady in Orange, Courtney Lyneé as the Lady in Blue, and Theatre in the X co-founder LaNeshe Miller-White as the Lady in Brown. Per Metro Philadelphia, Miller-White intentionally chose Shange's piece for the 2026 season to spotlight women's stories and sisterhood, a direct contrast to the company's 2025 Malcolm X Park staging of Jeff Stetson's Fraternity, which featured an all-male cast.
The choice carries personal weight for Miller-White. Metro Philadelphia reports that she played the Lady in Blue in a 2008 production of the same choreopoem, and now returns to the script 18 years later in a different role. Shange's work explores stories of womanhood, survival, passion, and empowerment through poetry, dance, and music, and audience members are encouraged to arrive early to set up chairs and connect with neighbors before each show.
Staging an Obie-Winning Classic Outdoors
Director Cheyenne Barboza envisioned this run as an intimate “Sister Sanctuary,” according to BroadwayWorld, pairing the performance with a community block-party atmosphere in which the audience brings its own lawn chairs to the park. That approach fits the choreopoem's own unlikely origin story: the piece had its first public showing on December 22, 1974, at Bacchanal, a women's bar in Berkeley, California, before its historic Broadway premiere at the Booth Theatre in September 1976, per the English Wikipedia entry on the work. The original Broadway run stretched to 742 performances, making it the longest-running play written by a Black playwright in Broadway history and surpassing Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 record set by A Raisin in the Sun, according to the Ntozake Shange Official Blog.
Theatre in the X has operated since 2013, when West Philadelphia native Carlo Campbell founded the company alongside Miller-White and Walter DeShields to give local Black artists opportunities while delivering free, professional-quality theater to the neighborhood, per the company's own account. The company describes its mission as eliminating location and cost barriers, delivering professional quality live drama to the community at no charge and using public green space as a cultural stage. That decade-long tradition has made the company a fixture for connecting local artists and neighborhood audiences through community-reflective stories, all promoted through its social media presence at @theatreinthex.
Malcolm X Park's Deeper History
The park at 5100 Pine St. carries its own layered history. It was originally established in 1903 as Black Oak Park before being officially renamed in 1993 through a Philadelphia city ordinance to honor Civil Rights leader Malcolm X, according to Hidden City Philadelphia. Murals inside the park depicting Malcolm X, Dr. Betty Shabazz, and West Philadelphia grassroots activist Rena Ennis were restored in 2024 through funding from the City of Philadelphia and The Enterprise Center CDC, per the Public Art Archive. The park also serves as the final destination for the annual Philadelphia Juneteenth Parade & Festival, a citywide tradition established in 2016 that draws upwards of 25,000 attendees to West Philadelphia each June, according to Visit Philadelphia — a role Hoodline has covered in past summers.
Miller-White's role extends beyond this one production. She was named Executive Director of Theatre Philadelphia in August 2020, according to American Theatre, positioning her as a leadership figure across the region's broader theater community while she continues her work with Theatre in the X in West Philadelphia. That dual role underscores how deeply this week's free shows are woven into both the neighborhood and the wider Philadelphia arts scene, as a fixture of a company still delivering professional theater to Malcolm X Park with no ticket required.
