Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls film is based on Ntozake Shange’s play, the self-described choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” In Perry’s film, there is a group of nine black women, most of whom live in the same Harlem apartment building, who all face personal crises, heartbreak and other challenges. Crystal faces an unhappy existence as an abused lover. Jo is a successful magazine editor, but her husband has a secret double life. Juanita is a relationship counselor, but cannot seem to get her love life in order. These three and the others become bound together by their experiences. The film and the play both shed light on the hardships that women of color face everyday. The film is not true …show more content…
Another difference between the play and the film is the way Perry translated the play. In Shange’s original work, the women share their stories of having left a dangerous place for a safe one. They tell their stories from a play of joy and happiness. They use poetry and movement to purge themselves of the pain, ultimately drawing lessons and support from one another. Their stories are told from a perspective of someone who is rising above and not looking back onto the pain and suffering they have endured but to the joy, freedom and happiness they are going to enjoy. Which is also very similar to what some critics said as well, Sheri Parks in The Crooked Room article talks about how black women had to deal with stereotypes all their lives but how when “For Colored Girls...” came out they felt a huge relief was lifted off their shoulders and that was a better outlet for them to feel like it 's normal to have problems. Meanwhile, on the other hand, Perry 's adaptation focuses on the martyred woman abused and deceived by her pathological mate from a place of sorrow. He tells their stories as if the men in their lives are the cause for all the pain they are going through and they cannot escape it. He focuses much more on the abusive men in a sense that, the film would not have felt whole without the men for the women to tell their story. He gives the men a stage unlike in Shange’s play, they were not important roles. He focuses more on the abusive men than that of the women who are actually trying to recover their