Have you ever felt boxed in by a stereotype or generalization? As if you constantly had to prove your self-worth to others?

For many African-American students, this is a common experience – one that senior Zimanei Slocum and her four friends want to bring attention to.  So this weekend, they’ll stage the play, “For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” which highlights the struggles African-American females face in a society that often devalues them.

Slocum will be joined on the SCHS theater stage by seniors Madia Watts, Victoria Holland, ZemZem Khiar, and junior Jaylyn Bradshaw.

”Black people have to constantly prove themselves. [I have to make it known that] I’m educated, I speak proper English, I’m willing to go to college, and I have goals,” Khiar said in explaining her motivation for staging the play, which has a 7 p.m. showtime today and tomorrow.

The play, a poetry-style piece written by Ntozake Shange in 1976, is about women who have been victims of things like rape and abusive relationships. The stories the characters tell through Shange’s poetry represent the sisterhood that colored girls create in order to get through not only the problems they are facing, but the way society views them because of these issues and the color of their skin.

Together, Khiar, Slocum and the three other cast members will perform as the characters who have gone through these traumatic, life-altering experiences, emerging stronger because of them. While the play takes on serious issues, it is ultimately intended to be empowering.

The cast is simply the five girls, making the show the very first theater production at SCHS with an all-black cast.

Slocum, Watts, Holland, Bradshaw, and Khiar have performed excerpts from the play at the Black Student Union (BSU) rally. Though they initially wanted to perform the full play in the school theater during Black History Month, around the same time of the BSU rally, the theater was not available until the end of the year, making the performance a heartfelt goodbye from the graduating seniors.

After theater teacher Angelo Reyes brought up the play to the girls, they became completely immersed in the idea of performing it. They have been practicing for months after school and during lunch, and even watched the film adaptation directed by Tyler Perry.

According to Reyes, putting on a play like this at the school is long overdue. “I’ve always wanted to do a play that addressed African-American people or other minorities, because though the theater department has a handful of Latinos, there are only a couple of black kids,” Reyes said.

Slocum is the only cast member with previous acting experience, and as one of the two black students in her Theater 2 class, the play holds a lot of meaning to her personally. As a graduating senior, this play is also her last performance as a student.

“I want people to be educated,” Slocum said, “I want people to know that we exist.”

In the beginning of the show, there will be a segment dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement; a movement that seeks to recognize African-American people who have been mistreated by police.

As for the show as a whole, Slocum said “It’s deep, but it’s fun, and we hope that students come with open minds, laugh and have fun.”