Selected Plays

by Alice Childress, Kathy A. Perkins (Editor)

The first African American woman to have a play professionally produced in New York City ( Gold Through the Trees , in 1952), Alice Childress occupies an important but surprisingly under-recognized place in American drama. She herself rejected an emphasis on the pioneering aspects of her career, saying that “it’s almost like it’s an honor rather than a disgrace” and that she should “be the fiftieth and the thousandth by this point”—a remark that suggests the complexity and singularity of vision to be found in her plays. Childress worked as an actress before turning to playwriting in 1949, and she was a political activist all of her life. 

Spanning the 1940s to the 1960s, the plays collected here are the ones Childress herself believed were her best, and offer a realistic portrait of the racial inequalities and social injustices that characterized these decades. Her plays often feature strong-willed female protagonists whose problems bring into harsh relief the restrictions faced by African American women. This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the work of a major playwright whose impact on the American theater was profound and lasting.

Genres: Plays, Race

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 19, 2011

About the author

Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author.

She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off-broadway union for actors. Her first play, Florence, was produced off-Broadway in 1950.

Her next play, Just a Little Simple (1950), was adapted from the Langston Hughes' novel Simple Speaks His Mind. It was produced in Harlem at the Club Baron Theatre. Her next play, Gold Through the Trees (1952), gave her the distinction of being one of the first African-American women to have work professionally produced on the New York stage. Her next work, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, was completed in 1962. The setting of the show is South Carolina during World War I and deals with a forbidden interracial love affair. Due to the scandalous nature of the show and the stark realism it presented, it was impossible for Childress to get any theatre in New York to put it up. The show premiered at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and later in Chicago. It was not until 1972 that it played in New York at the New York Shakespeare Festival. It was later filmed and shown on TV, but many stations refused to play it.

In 1965, she was featured in the BBC presentation The Negro in the American Theatre. From 1966 to 1968, she was awarded as a scholar-in-residence by Harvard University at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Alice Childress is also known for her literary works. Among these are Those Other People (1989) and A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973). Also, she wrote a screenplay for the 1978 film based on A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich. Her 1979 novel A Short Walk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Childress described her writing as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society. In conjunction with her composer husband, Nathan Woodard, she wrote a number of musical plays, including Sea Island Song and Young Martin Luther King.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Brad Hodges · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a drama major and I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge of American playwrights, so I'm embarrassed that I had not known who Alice Childress was before discovering that it is her centenary this year. She is probably best known for writing the novel A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich, but the huge bulk of her work was plays, and she was the first African-American woman to have a play professionally produced in New York City.

I picked up a copy of Selected Plays, that features five of her best works. It starts with a terrific one-act called "Flora," which shows a segregated railroad station--one half for blacks, the other for whites. A woman is sending her daughter off to New York to be an actress. She strikes up a conversation with a well-meaning white woman, who has contacts in the theater, to help her find a job. But when it turns out she means help finding her work as a domestic, the mother is insulted and devastated. It's a short, piercing work.

The next is "Gold Through the Trees," a revue of various monologues and sketches that represent the black experience in America but probably doesn't read as well as it plays. My favorite play was "Trouble in Mind," a backstage drama about a play about African Americans that is written by a white man and directed by a white man but with a predominantly black cast. It's set in the 50s, so there's a lot of tension--black actors are grateful for any parts, but the director is one of those guys who thinks he's progressive on race but at times is merely patronizing. The moment when the cast turns on him and calls him a racist, which shocks him to the core, is scintillating.

"Wedding Band" is a play that is set in 1918 and concerns an interracial relationship. With the release of Loving later this month it made reading it very timely. A black woman moves into a rowhouse in Charleston, South Carolina, and it is soon known to her neighbors that she has been seeing a white man for about ten years. Of course mixed marriages were illegal in the South, and she holds the dream of going to New York to marry him, but he comes down with influenza at her house and she meets his mother,and they exchange some of the most vicious epithets you're likely to hear.

Finally, there is a one-act called "Wine in the Wilderness," written much later and presented on television in 1972. It is more focused on black people see themselves--there are no white characters. An artist is painting a triptych about black womanhood. One third is an innocent black girl, the middle is the "Abyssinian maiden," who looks like a model. The third is to be the opposite, whom the artist describes as "She's as far from my African queen as a woman and still be female; she's as close to the bottom as you can get without crackin' up . . . she's ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, vulgar. . . a poor, dumb chick that's had her behind kicked until it's numb."

He has friends of his search for a model that fits that description and they bring up a woman, and the artist ends up falling in love with her as he paints her, and she spends the night. But when she finds out why she was brought up there, well, you can imagine.

The four straight dramas in this book could easily be put on today and be relevant, and it's a shame in during the 100th anniversary of her birth that no one has, as Alice Childress is a name that should be better known in American drama.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wedding Band is my favorite. These plays all address race relations within various communities. Childress has a style that evolves over time. This volume of her plays concludes with an intriguing look into a black neighborhood under siege.

[max theodore · Rating 4 out of 5]

it is some kind of failure of the education system and my own reading that this is the first i've read of alice childress, because my god. what a nimble and piercing set of plays. ranked in order of my personal enjoyment:

Trouble in Mind (1955)
WILETTA: Henry, I want to be an actress, I've always wanted to be an actress and they ain't gonna do me the way they did the home rule! I want to be an actress 'cause one day you're nineteen and then forty and so on... I want to be an actress! Henry, they stone us when we try to go to school, the world's crazy.
a play within a play: a theatrical company trying to put on a show about lynching. key word trying; the play is bad. for a script that's just a bunch of people sitting around their own scripts, this is blitz-fast and it made me fucking CRAZY BONKERS IN THE HEAD. everyone in the world should read trouble in mind you can find a pdf on google.com it will take you like two hours and it makes me froth and foam at the mouth

Wine in the Wilderness (1969)
TOMMY: They got to callin' me Tommy for short, so I stick with that. Tomorrow Marie... sound like a promise that can never happen.
hard to describe this one; it's a one-act on art and misogynoir and class and the relationships between men and women, but it's also just really really enjoyable to read. tommy i adore you so much. this is the last play in the collection, and after reading the first four, i definitely wasn't expecting this one to end on a final glimmer of hope. but it's such a perfect ending note.

Florence (1949)
MAMA: Do tell! What shame has she got?
MRS. CARTER: It's obvious! This lovely creature... intelligent, ambitious, and well... she's a Negro!
MAMA [waiting eagerly]: Yes'm, you said that...
this one is very short and it punched me in the face. how is this the first play childress ever wrote. what the hell and fuck. everything down to the staging in a train station with a black/white seating divide... oh i'm crazy

Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966)
JULIA: We the ones built the pretty white mansions... for free... the fishin' boats... for free... made your clothes, raised your food... for free... and I loved you—for free.
on an interracial relationship that hasn't become a marriage, because it's south carolina in 1918. what got me about this one was how clear it is that julia and herman adore each other, and how that still doesn't mean herman understands what it's like to live as a black person in america. many, many things going on in this one, and i'm not sure the pacing worked for me personally, but i should probably read it again.

Gold Through the Trees (1952)
OLA: All my life I have hoped to see freedom, isn't it strange that the only way to gain equality is to die? I should so love to see it. I have dreamed of being here, alive when that day comes.
i think i didn't get the full effect of this play, because the stage directions indicate that huge parts of it rely on set, costume, and music, and i am reading a script. so the rapid switching of time periods and locations jolted me more than it carried me along. that said, the last scene is about the anti-apartheid movement in south africa and it made me want to actually bawl. childress solos again

anyway. recommended if you're into theater or plays about women or plays about black women specifically or plays that are good or writing that is good

[cecil · Rating 5 out of 5]

trouble in mind 🔛🔝

[Yooperprof · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to put a star rating on this collection, because of its overriding "historical" importance - documenting the career of a major African Amercan playwright who was female.

The five plays "selected" here are uneven, but the two outstanding pieces, "Trouble in Mind" and "The Wedding Band" are very strong indeed. I am very much looking forward to seeing "The Wedding Band" performed at the Stratford [Ontario] Festival this summer. If anything, "Trouble in Mind" reads even better, and to my mind, presents itself as a truly outstanding work of theatre.

[Lorrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this because I heard about the play “Florence”. I was sad that I had never heard of this remarkable woman. “Florence” was a wonderfully written play and I would love to see it performed. The themes are strong and show an interesting POV on race and prejudice. It depicts its time frame really well. I struggled with some of the others, but I admire this lady and her talent.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unbeatable collection that should be on every syllabus in the country. Each play better than the last, with a wonderfully informative introduction.