Alice Childress

Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American actress, playwright, and novelist born in Charleston, South Carolina. After her parents separated when she was nine years old, she relocated to Harlem, New York City, where she was raised by her grandmother, Eliza Campbell White, on 118th Street between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Her grandmother, the daughter of a slave, had no formal education but encouraged Childress to develop her abilities in reading and writing. Childress attended public school in New York for her middle-school years and went on to Wadleigh High School, leaving after her grandmother died. She did not attend college.

To support herself, Childress worked a range of jobs, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939 she began studying drama at the American Negro Theatre (ANT), where she performed for eleven years. During that period she appeared in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). The ANT production of Anna Lucasta transferred to Broadway, where it became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history, with a cast that also included Hilda Simms, Canada Lee, Georgia Burke, Earle Hyman, and Frederick O'Neal. Though some biographies have attributed a Tony Award nomination to her performance, that claim appears to be inaccurate, as the Tony Awards did not begin until 1947, after the production had already run. Childress's Broadway career spanned from 1944 to 1960 and also included the plays The Cool World and Trouble in Mind.

Childress launched her playwriting career in 1949 with the one-act play Florence, which she also directed and starred in. The play centers on Mama Whitney, a Black Southern working-class woman who sets out by train from South Carolina to New York City to bring home her daughter, a struggling actress, but ultimately decides to send her money instead after a white woman offers to help Florence by recommending her for work as a maid. Childress wrote Florence in part to challenge fellow actors, including Sidney Poitier, who argued that only extreme situations such as lynching could hold an audience's interest in a play about Black and white characters. Her 1950 play Just a Little Simple, adapted from Langston Hughes's novel Simple Speaks His Mind, was produced at the Club Baron Theatre in Harlem. Her next work, Gold Through the Trees (1952), gave her the distinction of being among the first African-American women to have a professionally produced play staged in New York. The success of these productions enabled her to establish Harlem's first all-union off-Broadway contracts.

Trouble in Mind, Childress's first full-length dramatic play, was produced at Stella Holt's Greenwich Mews Theatre in 1955 and ran for 91 performances. The play examines racism in the theater world through a play-within-a-play structure, depicting the frustrations of Black actors working in mainstream white theater. Plans for a Broadway transfer were abandoned when Childress refused to alter the play's ending. Had it opened on Broadway, it would have been the first play by an African-American woman to do so, a distinction that instead went to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun four years later. Biographies and Childress's 1994 obituary state that Trouble in Mind won an Obie Award for best off-Broadway play of the 1955–56 season, which would have made her the first African-American woman to receive that honor; however, the play does not appear in the American Theatre Wing's records for that season. A Broadway revival of Trouble in Mind ran from October 29, 2021, to January 9, 2022, at Roundabout Theatre Company's American Airlines Theatre, directed by Charles Randolph-Wright and starring LaChanze, Chuck Cooper, Michael Zegen, Danielle Campbell, Jessica Frances Dukes, Brandon Micheal Hall, Don Stephenson, Alex Mickiewicz, and Simon Jones. The production received four Tony Award nominations, including Best Revival of a Play, Best Actress in a Play for LaChanze, Best Featured Actor in a Play for Chuck Cooper, and Best Costume Design in a Play for Emilio Sosa.

Childress completed Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White in 1962, a play set in South Carolina during World War I that centers on a forbidden interracial love affair. No New York theater would stage it due to its subject matter, and it premiered instead in 1966 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before also being produced in Chicago. The play did not reach New York until 1972, when it was presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival starring Ruby Dee. It was subsequently filmed for television, though many stations declined to broadcast it. A production was staged at Theatre for a New Audience from April 23 to May 15, 2022, directed by Awoye Timpo and featuring Thomas Sadoski and Veanne Cox. In the summer of 2023, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival produced the play with Antonette Rudder and Cyrus Lane in the leading roles, directed by Sam White.

In 1965, Childress was featured in the BBC presentation The Negro in the American Theatre. From 1966 to 1968, she served as a scholar-in-residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Working with her composer husband, Nathan Woodard, she wrote the musical plays Young Martin Luther King, originally titled The Freedom Drum, in 1968, and Sea Island Song in 1977.

Between 1950 and 1955, Childress published more than thirty columns in Freedom, the newspaper associated with Paul Robeson. In 1956 she collected and adapted a number of those columns into her novel Like One of the Family. In 1952, also in connection with Freedom, she collaborated with Lorraine Hansberry on a pageant for the newspaper's Negro History Festival, with narration provided by Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Douglas Turner Ward, and John O. Killens. Childress, sixteen years older than Hansberry, introduced her to the Black theatrical community of New York, and the pageant represents Hansberry's earliest surviving theatrical work.

Childress described her writing as an effort to portray those she called the have-nots in a have society, and she became involved in social causes throughout her career, including forming an off-Broadway union for actors. Her paper archive is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.