“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” is not a play. Or that’s not what the breakthrough work was called by its author, Ntozake Shange. Her word was “choreopoem,” and any production of “For Colored Girls,” like the major revival now in previews at the Public Theater, has to figure out what the term means.

To the revival’s director, Leah C. Gardiner, the definition is not that complicated. “A choreopoem,” she said, “is a combination of all forms of theater storytelling.” Which isn’t to say that it’s simple to realize. In the carefully chosen words of the revival’s in-demand choreographer, Camille A. Brown, “combining text with movement is very complex.”

For Paula Moss, the choreographer of the original 1976 production at the Public, “choreopoem” summons a memory of San Francisco in 1973. Shange, who died last year, had just met Ms. Moss in a dance class and invited her to a poetry reading.

“She stood up and started to read a few of her poems,” Ms. Moss recalled in a telephone interview from her home in Rome. “Normally, poets stand there very stiff, but as she read, she starting dancing. Everyone was shocked.”