On saturday night in Pittsburgh, after a visit to the South Side, I went with Ann (of All That Chat) to an excellent production of Ntozake Shange's Broadway smash of decades ago, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF. Strange thing: The prodcution seems to deliberately discourage applause for the first 20 minutes or so in the placing of its sound cues, and we were led to believe they didn't want us to applaud the individual moments throughout the show. But talking to someone at the theater after the show, some nights, the applause has happened for certain individual moments. The applause was great at the end, but I hope the cast didn't think during the show that we were a bad audience. The staging was just confusing at the outset on whether it was OK to applaud during the show.