Yesterday we went to see “The Color Purple”on Broadway. It was first a book by Alice Walker (1982), then a film starring Whoopi Goldberg (1985) and is now a play put on by Oprah Winfrey,who was in the film and has since become rich and famous.
It was not as good as the book or even the film.
Unlike the book and the film, the play is set to music and is full of songs, yet the songs are not that good. Also, the characters do not seem real and it is too long. The ending of the play, however, is very touching, and LaChanze, who played Celie, the lead character, was very good.
The image of the two sisters, Celie and Nettie, playing in a tree, is very strong throughout the play.
What most ruined the play for me was the lesbian love affair between Celie and Shug Avery: women kissing one another and falling in love. It is in the book, true, but the play gave it an even larger part of the story.
In the book you could believe that Celie’s life was so loveless that she would take love from wherever she could find it. In the play Celie is much more clearly a lesbian: she will not let Shug go, she dresses more like a man than other women and tells us in a song that this is who she is.
Compared to the film and even the book, the play is not only more lesbian but also more feminist: it is a much more clearly drawn battle between the sexes where men are generally evil and women good – and yet the trouble with women is that they are not enough like men!
The characters are not believable because have no depth – they are all one-sided. They are more like characters in a fable.
Although the story is set in the 1920s in a small town in the American south in the state of Tennessee, and the cars and the clothes and even much of the music is in period, the ideas and thoughts are from after the 1960s:
- pantheism: God is in everyone and everything. A very old idea, but one that was not common in America till the rise of New Age religion.
- feminism: If women became more like men their lives would be much better.
- free love: men and women sleep around, the bonds of marriage are weak.
- The most important thing in life is not doing one’s duty to God, family or country, but self-expression.
- One’s sins and vices are justified as “being who I am”.
- A love affair between women as something ordinary and not as something secret or shameful.
Remember that small-town Tennessee in the 1920s was the same place where the Scopes Monkey Trial took place, when Tennessee fought against teaching Darwin.
See also:
Abagond 
re,: and yet the trouble with women is that they are not enough like men!
I didn’t feel like this was the case; Shug is very sensual, and womanly; if the other women are strong, or “manly” perhaps it becauses their evnvironment required that they place survivial before beauty.
That men are absusive of woman in many of Alice Walker’s works are simply a representation of a culture that is sexist and abusive of women.
I think your definition of feminism is off base. It isn’t that women want to be more like men; it is that they deserve to be treated as equal to men, and it works against power deferentials between the sexes. I don’t think this committment translates to a loss of femininity; instead, I think it is a step toward treating all people as equals. We shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of sex or gender.
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@ George Ryder
It “explains” nothing, only an insight into WHY it would be an “interesting” explanation to anyone who would think like that.
After all, MLK, Fredrick Douglass, Gordon Parks, Kanye West, James Brown, Cornel West, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, to name just a few, all had white lovers or wives, didn’t they?
Imo, those people have (or had) their choices and it makes no difference to what they stand for. They were allowed to be free spirits and cross lines.
But Alice Walker? How dare she! Punish and attack her instead, right?
“interesting” that the credibility of these men I listed earlier, their message and work IS NOT dismissed and trivialized and insulted because of their private lives.
Double Standard, at work, perhaps? Sexism? Oh no, of course not.
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From what I gather, Alice Walker lived for several years with Robert Allen (editor of the Black Scholar publication). What does THAT explain?
She also had a love affair with a black woman.
What does that explain?
Obviously women artists and activists, especially black ones, will get judged differently than their male counterparts.
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when i watched the film adaptation of the color purple, i didn’t get a sense that celie and shug were lesbian lovers.
I actually thought shug was showing affection to celie, because she wanted to show celie something she never experienced.
Someone being tender and loving toward her in a sensual way. not to mention, give her confidence in herself by showing her that someone like her ( shug) liked her enough to say she thought she had such a beautiful smile and would go as far to kiss her to show her how beautiful she was ( at least in her mind )
Even with the hand placements in the segment, still didn’t lead me to think they made love, when the segment ended.
I had the impression that it was left at sensual kisses, caressing and nothing more.
There wasn’t an attempt by Spielberg to made it a point to go into any sexual relationship between celie and shug, so i felt it was left up to the interpretation of the viewer to make that determination.
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