LEST WE FORGET ALICE CHILDRESS
(October 12, 1916 - August 14, 1994)

Playwright, novelist, actor, screenwriter who fought for union off-Broadway contracts that would assure advanced pay for actors.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, she grew up in New York City's Harlem under the care of Eliza Campbell White, her grandmother,  a storyteller who first created Alice's interest in writing and theatre.  Self-educated, she completed two years of high school in Harlem and in 1939 helped to found the American Negro Theatre (ANT) in which she
performed, directed, and designed costumes for 11 years.

Aware of the shortage of good theatrical roles for black women, she wrote the one-act play Florence in 1949.  First performed in a tiny Harlem loft, it excited such critical acclaim that she was launched as a playwright.  The character of Mama in Florence is the first of Alice's many "genteel poor" stage characters.  Instead of the falsely romantic characters in popular literature, she created intelligent, sensitive, and complex characters who may be impoverished and lacking formal education but whose love of art and learning--along with a fierce personal pride and independence--make them admirable.  Her self-educated poor exhibit strength and self-assurance but unlike most other American heroes, they are usually black, female, and aging.
      Florence reflects the many themes that characterized her later writings, including black female empowerment, interracial politics, working-class life, and attacks on black stereotypes.

Anna Lucasta by Philip Yordan, premiered on Broadway in 1944 at the Mansfield Theatre. Inspired by Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, the play was originally written about a Polish American family. The American Negro Theatre director Abram Hill and director Harry Wagstaff Gribble adapted the script for an all African American cast which included Hilda Simms as Anna, Earl Hyman as Rudolf, Canada Lee in a small supporting role  and Alice Childress as Blanche. She was nominated for a Tony Award for featured actress.  The play ran for 957 performances and also toured the United States and Europe, appearing in London in 1947 at His Majesty's Theatre.
A film adaptation in 1959 starred Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis, Jr.

                                                  With the Off-Broadway union performances of Just a Little Simple (1950) and Gold Through the Trees (1952), she became the first professionally produced black female playwright.  At the end of the 1955-1956 Off-Broadway season, Trouble in Mind won an Obie Award for Best Original Play, making Alice Childress the first black woman to be awarded the honor.  She wrote over a dozen plays.

Earle Hyman and Hilda Simms

Trouble in Mind, her first full-length play, was based on her own struggles against what she perceived as a racist and sexist theatre system. She created the character Wiletta Mayer, a talented middle-aged black actress cast as the mother of a civil rights activist son, Job, in a play entitled "Chaos in Belleville."  Wiletta and the white director, Al Manners, clash in their interpretation of the play within the play.  First produced at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York on November 3, 1955, it ran for ninety-one performances.

Ruby Dee in Wedding Band

She wrote Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White in 1962-1963.  A full-length tragedy set in Charleston, South Carolina in 1918, it was given a rehearsed reading in 1963 and then produced professionally at the University of Michigan in 1966. It was optioned for Broadway several times but never produced because it was considered too controversial. Joseph Papp produced it at the Public Theatre (NYC) in 1972 and ABC gave the production a prime-time airing, even though a few stations refused to broadcast it.
Starring Ruby Dee and Eileen Heckart, Wedding Band is a story of miscegenation in World War 1 South Carolina. Ruby Dee's portrayal of the lonely, stalwart, and melancholy Julia was the finest work she had done since Jean Genet's The Balcony. According to Hilton Als, a staff writer for the New Yorker, "part of the brilliance of the script is Childress's refusal to take sides; no one in this story is right in their love, or wrong. but what makes it particularly interesting from a cinematic point of view is how Papp tries to work within the conventions of the theater--the piece is very actor-centered--as he explores how the camera's eye can change the spectator's focus."

Two plays for children were published in 1975 and 1977. When the Rattlesnake Sounds dramatizes a scene from the life of Harriet Tubman shortly before the end of slavery.  Tubman's strength and bravery renew the flagging spirits of two young women working in a laundry to raise money for the abolitionist cause.    Let's Hear It for the Queen dramatizes from a feminist perspective the nursery rhyme about the Queen of Hearts who made some tarts.  In her children's plays as well as her adult plays she shows girls and women how to be brave and creative in solving problems.

One of her most famous works, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973) helped launch her career as a young adult novelist.  Difficult social issues such as racism, drug use, teen pregnancy, and homosexuality are confronted. It won the Jane Addams Honor Award in 1974 and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award from the University of Wisconsin in 1975.

Before her death, she received various awards and grants, including a Rockefeller grant, a graduate medal from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, the Radcliff Alumnae Graduate Society Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and a Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).

"Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne."
                                                                                                     Alice Childress


References:  Notable Women in American Theatre. 1989  Rosemary Curb
http://blackpast.org/aah/childress-alice-1916-1994
Wikipedia