Childress, Alice 1920–1994

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Chil-dress"; born October 12, 1920, in Charleston, SC; died of cancer, August 14, 1994, in Queens, NY; married second husband, Nathan Woodard (a musician), July 17, 1957; children: (first marriage) Jean (Mrs. Richard Lee). Education: Attended public schools in New York, NY.

CAREER: Playwright, novelist, actress, and director. Began career in theater as an actress, with her first appearance in On Strivers Row, 1940; actress and director with American Negro Theatre, New York, NY, for eleven years, featured in the plays Natural Man, 1941, Anna Lucasta, 1944, and Florence, which she also wrote and directed, 1949; also performed on Broadway and television; made her film appearance in Uptight, in 1968. Lecturer at universities and schools; member of panel discussions and conferences on Black American theater at numerous institutions, including New School for Social Research, 1965, and Fisk University, 1966; visiting scholar at Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute), Cambridge, MA, 1966–68. Member of governing board of Frances Delafield Hospital.

MEMBER: PEN, Dramatists Guild (member of council), American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Writers Guild of America East (member of council), Harlem Writers Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS: Obie Award for best original off-Broadway play, Village Voice, 1956, for Trouble in Mind; John Golden Fund for Playwrights grant, 1957; Rockefeller grant, 1967; Outstanding Book of the Year, New York Times Book Review, Woodward School Book Award, 1974, Jane Addams Children's Book Honor Award for young adult novel, 1974, National Book Award nomination, 1974, Best Young Adult Book of 1975, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, University of Wisconsin, 1975, all for A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich; Sojourner Truth Award, National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs, 1975; Virgin Islands film festival award for best screenplay, and first Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts, Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, both 1977, both for A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich; "Alice Childress Week" officially observed in Charleston and Columbia, SC, 1977, to celebrate opening of Sea Island Song; Paul Robeson Award, 1980; Best Book, School Library Journal, 1981, one of the Outstanding Books of the Year, New York Times, 1982, notable children's trade book in the field of social studies, National Council for the Social Studies and Children's Book Council, 1982, and honorable mention, Coretta Scott King Award, 1982, all for Rainbow Jordan; Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal, 1984; Audelco Pioneer Award, 1986; Lifetime Achievement Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 1993.

WRITINGS:

Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life, Independence Publishers, 1956, reprinted with an introduction by Trudier Harris, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1986.

(Editor) Black Scenes (collection of scenes from plays written by African Americans), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1971.

A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (novel; also see below), Coward (New York, NY), 1973, reprinted, Puffin (New York, NY), 2000.

A Short Walk (novel), Coward (New York, NY), 1979.

Rainbow Jordan (novel), Coward (New York, NY), 1981.

Many Closets, Coward (New York, NY), 1987.

Those Other People, Putnam (New York, NY), 1989.

PLAYS

Florence (one-act), first produced in New York, NY, at American Negro Theatre, 1949.

Just a Little Simple (based on Langston Hughes's short story collection Simple Speaks His Mind), first produced in New York, NY, at Club Baron Theatre, September, 1950.

Gold through the Trees, first produced at Club Baron Theatre, 1952.

Trouble in Mind, first produced off-Broadway at Greenwich Mews Theatre, November 3, 1955, revised version published in Black Theatre: A Twentieth-Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, edited by Lindsay Patterson, Dodd (New York, NY), 1971.

Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (first produced in Ann Arbor, MI, at University of Michigan, December 7, 1966; produced off-Broadway at New York Shakespeare Festival Theatre, September 26, 1972; also see below), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1973.

String (one-act; based on Guy de Maupassant's story "A Piece of String"; also see below), first produced off-Broadway at St. Mark's Playhouse, March 25, 1969.

Mojo: A Black Love Story (one-act; also see below), produced in New York, NY, at New Heritage Theatre, November, 1970.

Mojo [and] String, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY) (New York, NY), 1971.

When the Rattlesnake Sounds: A Play (for children), illustrated by Charles Lilly, Coward (New York, NY), 1975.

Let's Hear It for the Queen: A Play (for children), Coward (New York, NY), 1976.

Sea Island Song, produced in Charleston, SC, 1977, produced as Gullah in Amherst, MA, at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1984.

Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (based on the life of Jackie "Moms" Mabley), music and lyrics by Childress and her husband Nathan Woodard, first produced by Green Plays at Art Awareness, 1986, produced off-Broadway at Hudson Guild Theatre, February 4, 1987.

Also author of Martin Luther King at Montgomery, Alabama, music by Nathan Woodard, 1969; A Man Bearing a Pitcher, 1969; The Freedom Drum, music by Nathan Woodard, produced as Young Man Martin Luther King by Performing Arts Repertory Theatre, 1969–71; The African Garden, music by Nathan Woo-dard, 1971; and Vashti's Magic Mirror.

SCREENPLAYS

Wine in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama (first produced in Boston by WGBH-TV, March 4, 1969), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1969.

Wedding Band (based on her play of the same title), American Broadcasting Companies (ABC-TV), 1973.

A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (based on her novel of the same title), New World Pictures, 1978.

String (based on her play of the same title), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS-TV), 1979.

Also author of "Here's Mildred" column in Baltimore Afro-American, 1956–58. Contributor of plays, articles, and reviews to Masses and Mainstream, Black World, Freedomways, Essence, Negro Digest, New York Times, and other publications.

SIDELIGHTS: Alice Childress is considered by many to be the "greatest African American woman playwright in the history of this country," according to Susan Koppelman, writing in Belles Lettres. But Childress excelled in numerous creative fields. An award-winning actress and playwright, she also was a director and a novelist whose adult and juvenile works earned critical acclaim and the attention of numerous awards committees. Childress's work is noted for its frank treatment of racial issues, its compassionate yet discerning characterizations, and its universal appeal. Because her books and plays often deal with such controversial subjects as interracial relationships and teenage drug addiction, her work has been banned in certain locations. She recalled that some affiliate stations refused to carry the nationally televised broadcasts of Wedding Band and Wine in the Wilderness, and in the case of the latter play, the entire state of Alabama banned the telecast. In addition, Childress noted that as late as 1973 the novel A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sand-wich "was the first book banned in a Savannah, Georgia, school library since Catcher in the Rye." Despite such regional resistance, Childress won praise and respect for writings that a Variety reviewer termed "powerful and poetic." Koppelman noted that Childress's "ability to personalize social issues such as poverty, racism, addiction, and child abuse mobilized those who saw her plays and read her novels to take action on behalf of social justice."

A talented writer and performer in several media, Childress began her career in the theater, initially as an actress and later as a director and playwright. Although "theater histories make only passing mention of her,… she was in the forefront of important developments in that medium," wrote Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Trudier Harris. Rosemary Curb pointed out in another Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that Childress's 1952 drama Gold through the Trees was "the first play by a black woman professionally produced on the American stage." Moreover, Curb added, "As a result of successful performances of [Just a Little Simple and Gold through the Trees], Childress initiated Harlem's first all-union off-Broadway contracts recognizing the Actors Equity Association and the Harlem Stage Hand Local."

Partly because of her pioneering efforts, Childress is considered a crusader by many. But she is also known as "a writer who resists compromise," explained Doris E. Abramson in Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925–1959. "She tries to write about [black] problems as honestly as she can," thus, the problems Childress addressed most often were racism and its effects. Her Trouble in Mind, for example, is a play within a play that focuses on the anger and frustration experienced by a troupe of black actors as they try to perform stereotyped roles in a play that has been written, produced, and directed by whites. As Sally R. Sommer explained in the Village Voice, "The plot is about an emerging rebellion begun as the heroine, Wiletta, refuses to enact a namby-Mammy, either in the play or for her director." In the New York Times, Arthur Gelb stated that Childress "has some witty and penetrating things to say about the dearth of roles for [black] actors in the contemporary theatre, the cutthroat competition for these parts and the fact that [black] actors often find themselves playing stereotyped roles in which they cannot bring themselves to believe." And of Wedding Band, a play about an interracial relationship that takes place in South Carolina during World War I, Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times, "Childress very carefully suggests the stirrings of black consciousness, as well as the strength of white bigotry."

Both Sommer and the New York Times's Richard Eder found that Childress's treatment of the themes and issues in Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band gives these plays a timeless quality. "Writing in 1955,… Alice Childress used the concentric circles of the play-within-the-play to examine the multiple roles blacks enact in order to survive," Sommer remarked. She found that viewing Trouble in Mind years later enables one to see "its double cutting edge: It predicts not only the course of social history but the course of black playwriting." Eder stated: "The question [in Wedding Band] is whether race is a category of humanity or a division of it. The question is old by now, and was in 1965, but it takes the freshness of new life in the marvelous characters that Miss Childress has created to ask it."

The strength and insight of Childress's characterizations have been widely commented upon; critics contend that the characters who populate her plays and novels are believable and memorable. Eder called the characterizations of Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White "rich and lively." Similarly impressed, Harold Clurman wrote in the Nation that "there is an honest pathos in the telling of this simple story, and some humorous and touching thumbnail sketches reveal knowledge and understanding of the people dealt with." In the novel A Short Walk, Childress chronicled the life of a fictitious black woman, Cora James, from her birth in 1900 to her death in the middle of the century, illustrating, as Washington Post critic Joseph McLellan described it, "a transitional generation in black American society." McLellan noted that the story "wanders considerably" and that "the reader is left with no firm conclusion that can be put into a neat sentence or two." What is more important, he asserted, is that "the wandering has been through some interesting scenery, and instead of a conclusion the reader has come to know a human being—complex, struggling valiantly and totally believable." In her play Moms, Childress drew a portrait of real-life comic Jackie "Moms" Mabley, a popular black comedienne of the 1960s and 1970s. Dressed as a stereotypical shopping-bag lady, Moms Mabley was a television staple with her stand-up routine as a feisty woman with a sharp tongue. Childress, Mel Gus-sow wrote in the New York Times, "shrewdly gives Moms center stage and lets her comic sensibility speak for itself."

In several novels aimed at a young adult audience, Childress displayed her talent for believable characterization. In the novel A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, the author creates a portrait of a teenaged heroin addict by giving us his story not only from his point of view but from several of his friends and family as well. The Lion and the Unicorn's Miguel Oritz stated, "The portrait of whites is more realistic in this book, more compassionate, and at the same time, because it is believable, more scathing." In Those Other People, Childress tells of a group of young friends who are all outsiders: a homosexual, a wealthy black sister and brother, a teacher who has molested one of his students, and a psychiatric patient who was sexually abused as a girl. Each character tells his or her story in separate chapters. The result is a multifaceted look at a pivotal incident at their school which calls into question matters of race and sexual preference. Kathryn Havris, writing in the School Library Journal, called Those Other People "a disturbing, disquieting novel that reflects another side to life." A Publishers Weekly critic concluded that the novel provides "a penetrating examination of bigotry and racism."

Many have acclaimed Childress's work for its honesty, insight, and compassion. In his review of A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, Oritz wrote: "The book conveys very strongly the message that we are all human, even when we are acting in ways that we are somewhat ashamed of. The structure of the book grows out of the personalities of the characters, and the author makes us aware of how much the economic and social circumstances dictate a character's actions." Loften Mitchell concluded in Crisis: "Childress writes with a sharp, satiric touch. Character seems to interest her more than plot. Her characterizations are piercing, her observations devastating."

Childress died in 1994, leaving behind a body of work both on the stage and between the covers of books that continues to cast a sharp and penetrating light on aspects of the African-American experience. Writing in Footsteps, Marta J. Effinger noted that in Childress's plays, she left behind "a trail of courageous black characters." Effinger further commented that "without a doubt, [Childress's] plays are an important part of theater in American. Her dramas are a testament to brave, yet often forgotten, working women." Similarly, Olga Duncan, writing in the Journal of African American History, praised Childress's works for providing "important subject matter for critical evaluation of the history of dramatic literature in the United States." Duncan went on to observe that the author "wrote her plays despite economic conditions that made and continue to make a financially independent black theater nearly impossible to create…. Childress know not everyone would listen; but she trusted that those who had ears to hear would."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Abramson, Doris E., Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1969.

Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, Beech Tree Books (Taylors, SC), 1987.

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1988, pp. 25-49.

Brown, Janet, Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis, Scarecrow Press (Metuchen, NJ), 1979, pp. 56-70.

Children's Literature Review, Volume 14, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Contemporary Dramatists, fifth edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 12, 1980, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 96, 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, 1985.

Donelson, Kenneth L., and Alleen Pace Nilson, Literature for Today's Young Adults, Scott, Foresman (Glenview, IL), 1980, 2nd edition, 1985.

Drama Criticism, Volume 4, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, Doubleday-Anchor (New York, NY), 1984.

Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women, Macmillan (London, England), 1984, pp. 22-52.

Hatch, James V., Black Theater, U.S.A.: Forty-five Plays by Black Americans, Free Press (New York, NY), 1974.

Jennings, La Vinia Delois, Alice Childress, Twayne (New York, NY), 1995.

Miller, R. Baxter, editor, Black American Literature and Humanism, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1981, pp. 8-10.

Mitchell, Loften, editor, Voices of the Black Theatre, James White (Clifton, NJ), 1975.

Schlueter, June, editor, Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Rutherford, NJ), 1990, pp. 184-197.

Street, Douglas, editor, Children's Novels and the Movies, Ungar (New York, NY), 1983.

PERIODICALS

Atlanta Constitution, March 27, 1986, p. 1.

Belles Lettres, fall, 1994, Susan Koppelman, "Alice Childress: An Appreciation," p. 6.

CLA Journal, June, 1977, pp. 494-507.

Crisis, April, 1965.

Daily Worker, November 8, 1955, p. 7.

Footsteps, May, 2001, Marta J. Effinger, "Alice Childress," p. 18.

Freedomways, Volume 14, number 1, 1974.

Horn Book, May-June, 1989, p. 374.

Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, Volume 12, numbers 7-8, 1981.

Journal of African American History, winter, 2002, Olga Duncan, "Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright," p. 146.

Lion and the Unicorn, fall, 1978.

Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1978; February 25, 1983.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 25, 1982.

MELUS, winter, 1980, pp. 57-68; fall-winter, 2000, Joyce Meier, "The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women's Theater," p. 117.

Ms., December, 1979.

Nation, November 13, 1972.

Negro American Literature Forum, fall, 1976, pp. 93-95.

Negro Digest, April, 1967; January, 1968.

New Republic, November 25, 1972, pp. 22, 36.

Newsweek, August 31, 1987.

New York, November 13, 1972, p. 134.

New Yorker, November 4, 1972, p. 105; November 19, 1979.

New York Times, November 5, 1955, p. 23; February 2, 1969; April 2, 1969; October 27, 1972; November 5, 1972; February 3, 1978; January 11, 1979; January 23, 1987; February 10, 1987, p. 16; March 6, 1987; August 18, 1987; October 22, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1973; November 11, 1979; April 25, 1981.

Publishers Weekly, November 25, 1988, p. 67.

Sage, spring, 1987, pp. 66-68.

School Library Journal, February, 1989, p. 99.

Show Business, April 12, 1969.

Southern Quarterly, spring, 1987, pp. 53-62.

Variety, December 20, 1972.

Village Voice, January 15, 1979.

Washington Post, May 18, 1971; December 28, 1979.

Wilson Library Bulletin, September, 1989, p. 14.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Jet, September 5, 1994, p. 18.

Time, August 29, 1994, p. 25.