Chang W. Lee/The New York Times  Ntozake Shange was embraced at the Nuyorican Poets CafÃ© after a performance of her latest work.  Can computers talk black vernacular? This is a question that haunts Ntozake Shange.  On a recent evening, three days before her 65th birthday, Ms. Shange sat at the front table of the Nuyorican Poets CafÃ© in the East Village, listening to rich vernacular lines pouring from three characters who were all versions of her. Ms. Shange, best known for her 1970s verse play âFor Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,â wore a red dress and sat in a wheelchair facing the stage, her hands and feet dancing involuntarily in front of her. The show, called âLost in Language and Sound: Or How I Found My Way to the Arts,â was her first new theatrical work in more than a decade, and the words onstage were unmistakably hers, attuned to the rhythms of the jazz musicians and dancers on stage.  âI canât count the times I viscerally wanted to attack, deform and maim the language I was taught to hate myself in,â one of the characters said. âThe language that perpetuates the notion that causes pain to every black child.â No one else writes like that.  But for Ntozake Shange (pronounced en-toh-ZAH-kee SHAHN-gay), who once made a point of writing a poem every day so she would have fresh material to present at readings, the new lines came laden with an unfamiliar struggle. For the last decade, health problems have buffeted her relationship with language. First a pair of small strokes left her temporarily unable to read; then, in 2011, a neurological disorder called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy took control of her hands and feet, leaving her unable to type or write without difficulty. Until recently, she could not even stand or walk.  In between, Ms. Shange moved from the West Coast to Brooklyn to be near family members who could care for her.  âI canât work on a computer and I canât write very well, either,â she said the other day, her words still slightly slurred from the strokes. âIt sort of feels empty, not like Iâm swollen with words. I feel like thereâs an astringent being applied to my body so that everything is getting very tight and I canât release it right this minute.â  All of this has shaped the new work, which she calls a âchoreoessay,â in the same way that âFor Colored Girlsâ was a âchoreopoem,â said Claude Sloan, a longtime friend and director who shares a brownstone with her in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. âHer body is conspiring against her,â Mr. Sloan said. âHer art has always told the story of people who are suffering, and given meaning to their struggle. Now sheâs looking back and asking, âWhat is art going to be for me in the body that I have now?âÂ â  On a recent afternoon, Mr. Sloan wheeled Ms. Shange into the house of a neighbor, Evette Lewis, where she drank soda and talked about her adventures with voice recognition software.  âSpell-check ruins my work,â she said. âIt fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So Iâm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me. My characters donât talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different. So Iâm having a struggle with the grammar.â  The day before, Ms. Shange had walked upstairs for the first time since her illness; earlier, she said, she tried dancing to a mambo song on the radio and was in pain for two weeks.  âBut Iâve still got my characters in my head, and I can still hear them,â she said. âWhen I go to the grocery store I hear them. Or we went to the San Gennaro Festival a couple weeks ago in Manhattan and I could hear all those voices again, and that invigorated me, because I said, âWow, theyâre still here, I can do it again.â So I feel optimistic about my writing career. I just was not capable of doing it for some years.â  âLost in Language and Sound,â which Ms. Shange adapted from a collection of her essays, represents her next step back into the world â an experiment to see if the essays held together dramatically, and to test the interest of producers.  Ms. Shange, the daughter of a surgeon and a social worker, has lived a life as bumpy as those she writes about. After the explosive success of âFor Colored Girls,â which she developed during poetry readings in San Francisco, she struggled to find her way.  âIt was pretty arduous,â she said. âI never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg â thatâs me â into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didnât fit. And some black men had made really wretched statements about me, so there was all this controversy going on that I was trying to stay out of. It was difficult and very unpleasant to do interviews, because they always were trying to paint me as a woman who hated black men, and I didnât and donât. But that was a difficult time for me.â
Ntozake Shange, suffering from the effects of two strokes and a neurological disorder, is unable to write or type, and even voice recognition software is working against her, auto-correcting her very personal style.