Notable Artists on Childress

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 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.

DIALOGUES REFLECTIONS ON A PIONEER

ARMINDA THOMAS

“There is a tragedy here that cannot be underestimated. Alice Childress is a splendid playwright, a veteran—indeed, a pioneer. She has won awards, acclaim, and everything but consistent productions… We may salute and savor the glory of the black theatrical pioneer, but in a land where materialism is all-important, the real salutes take longer.” (Ruby Dee, 1975)1

Announcing her death in 1994, the New York Times headline read, “Alice Childress, 77, a Novelist;” the obituary allowed that she wrote some plays, too. While Childress would likely have objected to that order, having devoted the bulk of her life to playwriting, the paper of record’s choice is understandable. As a playwright, Childress’ story is more difficult to measure: hers was a progressive voice too often hemmed in by nervous benighted producers, a mainstage talent shoehorned into black box realities.

The story began, promisingly enough, at a little Harlem theatre with a big mission, the American Negro Theatre—a company so hardworking members called themselves the ANTs, and were expected to function as actors, directors, designers, and box office managers. "The American Negro Theatre Company," Childress recalled, "worked ten years without salary, four nights per week, keeping the same acting company together, until the boot-straps wore out.”2 When Childress expressed her discontent with the quality of the material in general and with the quality of roles for women past the ingénue stage in particular, her fellow ANT Sidney Poitier challenged her to write such a play overnight. She came in the next day with her first play, Florence—a gem of a piece centered around a character who would seldom be granted more than a line or two in most plays of that era. From the beginning, her work displayed her talent for marrying rich, layered characterization and sharp insight into the political forces shaping those characters.

1 Loften Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre (New Jersey, James T. White and Co., 1975), 222 2 Alice Childress, “But I Do My Thing,” New York Times, February 2, 1969 3 Alice Childress, “A Candle in a Gale Wind” in Mari Evans, Black

Women Writers (New York, Harbor), 113 After ANT disbanded, Childress along with several members joined forces with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts to keep providing opportunities for African American artists and audiences at Club Baron, a Harlem nightclub-turned-community theatre. Her pieces written for this venue spoke to the struggle for freedom (in the US and in Africa), while incorporating song, dance, and live music—a combination that was popular both with the crowds and the few critics who made the trip uptown. "Alice Childress seems to know more about language and drama than most people who write for theatre today," wrote Freedom magazine's reviewer Lorraine Hansberry in 1952.

“The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it. Those who repress and exclude us also claim the right to instruct us on how best to react to repression. All too often we follow their advice.” (Childress, 1984)3

Then came the first big break—Trouble in Mind (1955), a full-length play at Greenwich Mews, a downtown theatre with a liberal cachet. Sure, deep into the rehearsal process the producers demanded that Childress craft a new ending, with a redemptive arc for the play's antagonist (a liberal, white director) and a hopeful resolution that she couldn’t quite believe in; still, the play was a hit, with sold-out audiences and effusive critics (though some did remark on the hokey ending). Even better, Broadway producers came knocking, and soon it was announced that Alice Childress would be the first African American woman to be produced on the Great White Way.

That announcement, however, turned out to be premature. The new would-be producers had more conditions, demanded more rewrites, until Childress “couldn’t recognize the play one way or the other.” After two years of concessions and more demands, Childress withdrew the play and restored her original ending for publication.

Wedding Band, Childress’s next full-length piece, also had auspicious beginnings. Though Childress would later describe it as “a play I did not want to

REFLECTIONS ON A PIONEER ARMINDA THOMAS

write, about people few wanted to hear from,” the first staged reading, at New Dramatists in 1963, led quickly to an option, and by January the New York Times was reporting that the play (“filled with Negro folk humor”) would open on Broadway the following October. This time, when the requests for changes began, Childress held firm; she wanted to write this play from a black perspective, and more specifically, from the perspective of a black everywoman—her protagonist, Julia Augustine. While willing to make revisions, she was not writing a play about Julia’s white partner, Herman, or through Herman’s eyes. Eventually, her vision prevailed—not on Broadway, though it was optioned several times more; and not on a New York stage, for nearly a decade. Still, the enthusiasm that greeted Wedding Band eventually led it to an Off-Broadway production at the Public Theater in 1972, followed by a televised production that drew a national market (save for the eight local network affiliates which refused to broadcast the play).

If the years between Wedding Band’s completion and its New York unveiling had not diminished the play’s power, they had made it seem less timely. At the time of its first reading, and of its original production at University of Michigan, anti-miscegenation laws were still in the books in 17 states (including South Carolina); by 1972, not only had the U.S. Supreme Court rendered those laws moot, but interracial couples had been featured on film (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) and television (“Star Trek”). Written in the wake of the March on Washington, in the thick of the battle for integration, the play landed well after civil rights marches had given way to assassinations, inner-city riots, and anti-busing crusades. In African American cultural circles, the conversation had moved on from integration. Childress, too, had moved on.

“The time is over for asking or even demanding human rights, in or out of the theater. We no longer ask for manhood or womanhood or dignity; all we can do is express what we have to the degree that we have it.” (Childress, 1969)1

1 Childress, “But I Do My Thing” 2 Quoted in Childress, Selected Plays, xxviii The latter half of the 1960s saw a resurgence of Black theatres across the nation—at least five sprang up in New York City alone. In the years before Wedding Band found a New York home, Childress had three new plays produced: two at New Heritage Repertory Company, one at the Negro Ensemble Company. While still deeply personal, deeply political, and deeply committed to telling black women’s stories, Childress’s new works shifted these women away from the terrain of interracial relations to explore more fully the navigation of class, gender, and racism-related tensions within African American communities.

From the beginning of her career, Childress had advocated for “a Negro People’s Theatre…powerful enough to inspire, lift, and eventually create a complete desire for the liberation of all oppressed peoples,” and if her rhetoric tempered, her belief in the necessity of black theatres remained firm. Still, she was sometimes frustrated by the constraints of writing to fit into the venues in which those companies operated. “I like writing full-length plays,” she confessed, “but I saw a need for short plays, because so many little theatres in black communities… need for many reasons, which we can understand, short plays. And also they kept writing me for something for their group of eight people to do or that they had forty minutes on a program or they had an hour.”2

It was, perhaps, this need to write as expansively as she craved, without having to compromise her vision, which led Childress take up novel writing. And while Childress never stopped writing or identifying as a playwright, it is nevertheless true that her second path garnered her the attention and acclaim she so richly deserved. •

ARMINDA THOMAS is production dramaturg for Wedding Band and co-producer and resident dramaturg for CLASSIX. Selected dramaturgy credits include Black Picture Show (Artists Space); Mirrors (Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop); Jazz (Marin Theatre Company); Zora Neale Hurston (New Federal Theatre); and The First Noel (Classical Theatre of Harlem). She is also a resident dramaturg for New Perspectives Theatre’s On Her Shoulders series, and previously served as Associate Artistic Director for the Going to the River Festival and Writer’s Unit, and as archivist and dramaturg for Dee-Davis Enterprises, where she was an executive producer for the Grammy-awarded audiobook, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together.