INTERVIEW CONTINUING THE LEGACY OF A "COLLISION ARTIST" AWOYE TIMPO AND ARMINDA THOMAS IN CONVERSATION WITH ALISA SOLOMON
Brittany Bradford (Julia Augustine). Photo by Henry Grossman.
During a break in rehearsals, Alisa Solomon of TFANA’s Council of Scholars spoke with dramaturg Arminda Thomas and director Awoye Timpo about Alice Childress, Wedding Band, and their theatre collective, Classix. ALISA SOLOMON Alice Childress is far from as well-
known as she should be, so it’s not a given that one would encounter her in an ordinary course of study or theatergoing. When did each of you first come across her work and what was your reaction? ARMINDA THOMAS I discovered Childress in the
basement of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee's home. I fell into a job in 1997 putting together their archives and going through their papers found that Ruby Dee was in the first four productions of Wedding Band—in Ann Arbor, Chicago, New York at the Public Theater, and on TV. I saw all the reviews, the programs, scripts, and so on. Just the sheer number of productions and a TV version of a play that I'd never heard of—that was a 8
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lot for me! And it was a performance Ruby Dee singled out in her book that she was particularly proud of. So, what was this piece that I hadn’t heard of? I mean, I'd heard of other plays she had major roles in Boesman and Lena and A Raising in the Sun. I had not heard of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band. I read one of the drafts and thought, Wow, this is intense, but it didn't really hit me it until 10 years later when I started working with Elizabeth Van Dyke on the Going to the River festival, and one of our productions was a staged reading of Wedding Band. When I heard it, when the words hit the air, I was just like, how, how, how is this not in a syllabus? How did I get all the way through BA in theater and an MFA in dramaturgy and into my professional years and not know this at all? Shortly after that, I was asked to consult on a reading of Trouble in Mind and had the same reaction. Then I worked on Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness for New Perspectives Theatre, and the same thing. Then I ran
