ATLANTA --- Jasmine Guy has been offered plenty of chances to direct since she starred on the TV series A Different World , but when the Atlanta native finally picked one, she made her debut far from the lights of Hollywood.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf opened in August in the basement of an Atlanta theater before a sellout crowd that included Ms. Guy's 9-year-old daughter.

Based on the 1975 work by Ntozake Shange, the play features a series of poems from nameless women known only by colors. It seeks to tell the perspective of black women in the United States through a series of poems on passion, rape, abortion, abuse and other adult subjects.

"They are just universal life themes," said Ms. Guy, which is why she said she allowed her daughter to give the play's introduction and sit beside her in the audience on opening night. "If we haven't gone through it, our friends have, or we know of it."

Ms. Guy, 46, is known for her role as spoiled college student Whitley Gilbert on A Different World , and also has performed on Broadway and released two recording albums. But after the show's six-season run ended in 1993, she shied away from requests to direct TV series and movies.

She met Carletta Hurt, the owner of IKAM Productions, through a mutual friend earlier this year and the two decided to partner the project together.

"She was trying to find something new to do, and I was looking for an up-and-coming director," said Ms. Hurt, who called the match "divine intervention."

Ms. Guy orchestrated the play in Atlanta in two months, in between stints volunteering for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She said she cast a multigenerational six-member cast to capture the different voices of each color and added an African drummer to give their story a melodic beat.

The play moves to the Douglass Theatre in Macon in October.

"The biggest challenge in directing a piece that was written in the '70s is that there were things about it that were dated that I understood where they were coming from back then, but it doesn't translate in the same way, because we have changed," she told The Associated Press in an interview before the opening performance.

Ms. Guy proudly calls herself the "eighth cast member" in her return to the stage. Also a dancer, Ms. Guy choreographed the dances in the play and blended in dances she learned in elementary school.

Her interpretation of the stageplay nixes the Lady in Brown and instead cedes her youthful spirit to another character. Ms. Guy also brings more dramatization to the performance, allowing the characters who traditionally give monologues to interact with each other.

Ms. Hurt has high hopes for the play -- she plans to make it a regular feature for her theater company, which also performed it in 2006.

And despite its humble setting in a basement, Ms. Guy said it's as good a place as any for her debut as a director.

Her next goal? A musical.

"Now I've got ideas," Ms. Guy said. "And I'm alive again."