A very pregnant black woman struts angrily across a spartan stage, her pink terry-cloth bathrobe barely large enough to fit around her protruding stomach.

“If I had a white picket fence I would have gone to school every day since I was four years old,” she says, her hands resting briefly on her womb.

“I had a choice to have sex? That’s bullshit.”

Kristy M. Johnson ’02 outlines a series of regrets, frustrations and desires in her role as a future teenage mom in the short skit, “Choice.” Instead of framing the abortion debate in its typical terms—as a choice between life or death—abortion becomes an economic, social and racial issue as well.

But nothing in this weekend’s student-written, student-directed Women In Color Project follows according to expectation. The 19-odd monologues, poems and skits discuss a broad array of issues facing young women in America.

Though the show is dubbed Women In Color, it is more than a hodgepodge of skits about different racial and ethnic groups to showcase issues of identity. Instead, Women In Color aims to be a cohesive attempt to bring issues that are often ignored by standard theater productions, such as street harrassment and interracial dating, to the Harvard stage.

The production, written by a group of 13 women between last spring and October, was written by the Women In Color campus group, a political and social forum to connect women of various ethnicities.

Scenes are race-specific: “Nuance” and “Asian American Shattered” both deal with ranges of skin tone among blacks and Asians.

But co-director Terry E. Chang ’02 said the common experience of being a minority in American links the disparate scenes together.

“There are a lot of the same themes and problems that manifest themselves in different cultures,” Chang said.

But the cast of 23 women and one man, many of whom have never appeared on stage before, are challenged with provoking complexes which an audience is likely to find intensely personal, regardless of individual race or ethnicity, Co-Director Taii K. Bullock ’02 said.

And for some of the actors, many of whom are appearing in skits or poems they’ve actually written, the parallels between life and the stage are often indistinguishable.

In “Black Enough,” Stephanie J. Dorvil ’05 plays a black girl coming of age in a mostly-white community.

Dorvil herself grew up in a Miami community without many other blacks.

“I have to remember to detach myself a little bit because I get so caught up in the words,” Dorvil said.