DIALOGUES ALICE CHILDRESS’S RADICAL ROOTS SOYICA DIGGS COLBERT
Photograph by Milton Meltzer of Hilda Haynes, James McMahon, Stephanie Elliot [?] and Charles Bettis in rehearsal for the 1955 off-Broadway premiere of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind at the Greenwich Mews. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Permalink.
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wice in her lifetime, Broadway producers optioned Alice Childress’s work, first in the 1950s and again in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until 2021 that her play Trouble in Mind made it to the Great White Way. As I wrote in “The Debut of ‘Trouble in Mind’ Reveals Progress—and Enduring Racism—On Broadway,” that 2021 Roundabout Theater production reflected contemporary racial struggles, speaking to the past and present and showing the prescient nature of Childress’s work. That it resonated in the midtwentieth century and continues to do so today marks Childress as one of those U.S. theatre artists whose vision is crucial, in the words of James Baldwin, to “mak[ing] America what America must become.” 16
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W A U D I E N C E 360° S E R I E S
The resurgence of Childress’s theatrical oeuvre on New York stages—and the demonstration of its lasting salience—continues with Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Wedding Band: a Love/Hate Story in Black and White. A play that reflects the enduring impact of Childress’s personal history and her early education on the left on her art, Wedding Band brings lessons she began learning in the 1940s into a play first produced in 1966. Childress, like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, had the good fortune of a long career. Writing in the wake of World War II, in the midst of the Cold War, during the burgeoning and classical phases of the Civil Rights
