It doesn’t matter how famous a play you’ve written, or how deeply embedded in the culture it’s become. If you’re a playwright, you’re always going to be nudging someone about putting that show onstage again.

So the last time they spoke, about a week before she died, the playwright and poet Ntozake Shange had a question for her director, Leah C. Gardiner.

“By the way,” she asked, “is there any movement on the production?”

She meant the Public Theater’s revival of her breakthrough work, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which starts previews on Oct. 8. Shange, who died last October at 70, envisioned the production as a celebration. It’s also a homecoming of sorts, at the theater where this enduringly influential choreopoem opened to acclaim in 1976.