NOTABLE ARTISTS ON ALICE CHILDRESS “She opened me up to positive new ways of looking at myself and others, and she encouraged me to explore the history of black people (as opposed to ‘colored’ people). She was instrumental in my meeting and getting to know the remarkable Paul Robeson, and for that alone I shall always be grateful.” - Sidney Poitier, This Life (1980) “Alice Childress is a splendid playwright, a veteran–indeed a pioneer. She has won awards, acclaim, and everything but consistent productions. It is difficult to think of a play by a white writer earning the reviews that Wedding Band earned in 1965 [sic] and then having to wait until 1973 to reach the New York stage.” - Ruby Dee, Voices of the Black Theatre (1975) “...[S]eldom is it given to one person to penetrate into the very hearts and minds of a whole people, to be sensitive in the highest degree to their joys, their hopes, their humors and their sorrows… to catch their quiet laughter and their overwhelming outbursts of merriment, their happy smiles and bitter ones, their righteous anger and deep nobility.” - Paul Robeson “Perhaps her greatest gift, along with her satiric bent and the thematic accent on struggle, is the leitmotif of love for people, particularly her own people. I have come away from most of her writing feeling mighty damn proud of the human race, especially the African aspect of it. Portraying it with great fidelity in all of its meanness, its pettiness, its prejudices, its superstitions, Childress captures most of all its capacity to overcome, to be better than it is, or ever could be, its monumental capacity for change.” - John Oliver Killens, “The Literary Genius of Alice Childress” (1984) Brittany Bradford (Julia Augustine) and Brittany-Laurelle (Mattie). Photo by Hollis King.
WEDDING BAND
5
