EPISODE 1

+ TRANSCRIPT

ALICE CHILDRESS So meanwhile, I’ve had about 12 options for Broadway and none of my works have ever reached it. Because it is show business.

And I wanted to do what I wanted to do. At least–I'm not rigid, “don't change my lines,” you can change what you want. Not “you can change”...I mean, ask me to change it. [Laughter] There’s people willing to do that too, child. But I don't want to change what I mean. And this is where the…movies, and television, and Broadway–“don't you think it would be nice instead of these stand-up people, that someone comes in and changes and rescues and so forth?” Well, no I didn't. I want to do what I want to do. And maybe I will. I've done a lot. Some people say they're waiting in the wings, a lot of us are working in the wings. We do what we want to do.

And this reward will go on in and in the works that I'm doing, and will continue to do. And enjoy your creative experience no matter where it takes you, or how long it takes you to get there. And thank you and bless everyone.

DOMINIQUE RIDER There is a specter haunting the American theater: the specter of Alice Childress. Hi, my name is Dominique Rider, and I'm going to be your host through this act of reclamation. This podcast is our attempt to stage an intervention in the current conversation around theatre history. (re)clamation recenters and uplifts the Black writers and storytellers of the American theatre - both the celebrated and the forgotten. While the last act focused intently on the history of black performers during the era of minstrelsy, we are focusing our attention on a singular figure for this act. Alice Childress looms as an incredibly important but often forgotten figure within the history of our field. Despite a successful Broadway opening and numerous regional productions and a renewed interest in the writing of black women, it still doesn't feel like we're seeing her for the titan that she was. And so here are some questions that are leading us through this act of reclamation: How does someone whose plays continue to speak to the realities of black people in this world get lost or disappeared for so long? How does such a fierce voice vanish into the crowd?...

More importantly, how does a person whose accomplishments and legacy should stretch out over decades suddenly become a ghost? …

The mission of Classix is to explode the classical canon through an exploration of black performance history and dramatic works by black writers. If we put this another way, the mission of Classix is to find new ways to revive the dead. If our ancestors have been resigned to the shadows, it is our job to shine a light on them. If our ancestors have been turned into ghosts, doomed to vanish into the depths of history, then it is our job to reach out across space and time. We start here.

DOMINIQUE For the first episode of Act 2, I am joined by fellow Classix member and capital “D” dramaturg, Arminda Thomas. Thank you, Arminda, for being here.

ARMINDA THOMAS Thank you for having me, Dominique.

DOMINIQUE It felt really important to me to start this sort of conversation with you because I consider you really a personal window into Childress for me. You were the first person that sent me Wine in the Wilderness; you were the first person that I was able to really talk to about her plays. And so I think I would love to know how you became obsessed with Alice Childress.

ARMINDA
OK. Well first of all, let me say that I am so happy and proud to be your gateway drug. So I discovered Alice Childress's the summer after I graduated from the dramaturgy program at Columbia, which means that I had a whole Master's.

I became first interested in Alice Childress–I was the archivist for Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee and spent some time in their basement kind of putting together their life and their work. It was really interesting, I think, on one level that I was kind of a full grown woman and a small “d” dramaturg at the time. But I knew nothing about black theater and did not know that I didn't know anything about black theater until I found myself in this basement in this job. And one of the people I discovered was Alice Childress, in part because Ruby Dee had done four productions of a play called Wedding Band, a play I'd never heard of. And the Davises had attempted to produce this play, had attempted to gather the funds to produce it on Broadway. So, it was a really important project for them–by someone that I'd never heard of. And she counted that role she played, she played the role of Julia, and she counted that like one of the most important roles of her career. And I had never heard of it. So this was kind of the repeating -

But then also, there was a group that Ruby Dee was part of that launched her career called the American Negro Theater–a thing I’d never heard of–and one of the key members of that group was Alice Childress. So, I just became interested at that point... Who is this woman? Who is this writer? Why don't I know her?

And then that kind of compounded a couple of decades later maybe; I was working with Elizabeth Van Dyke on the Going to the River Festival–this was 2017 maybe, 2018, in there–and she did a reading of Wedding Band as part of the Festival. And when I heard the words–because I had skimmed drafts of the script in the basement, but I had never really heard it. And when I heard it, I just was blown away. And then kind of Kismet, kind of the universe working on me, that I was asked to do a tiny bit of dramaturgy for a teacher who was doing a production of Trouble in Mind, a student production, and needed them to have some background into the Civil Rights Movement and said, “Oh, you do this.” And again so I said, okay, let me read Trouble in Mind and figure out what this is about. And again, blown away and just reading the history of Trouble in Mind.

And then I asked at New Perspectives, the next year, to do Wine in the Wilderness, to do a reading of that. New Perspectives is a theater company in New York, and they have a series called On Her Shoulders where they celebrate women writers who have gone before, and annually they try to make sure that they include a black writer. And I just assumed that they had done Childress already because they were like seven or eight years into this, and I just they said, no, we never have. And I felt like just over and over and over, I was drawn into just the space; the more I read of her and about her, the bigger the gap, the bigger the space, the empty space where she should be, kind of occupied my mind. And so by the time we met, one of the first things I said was: I want to see Alice Childress everywhere. I want an Alice Childress season in Harlem, I mean, because I was just that keyed up.

And so, I remember you said: “Oh, can you meet me and tell me about Alice Childress?” And I'm interested in knowing what was it about that conversation that infected you? What was it that made you want to explore more because you went even deeper. You went into unpublished plays, and you just went all in. So, I want to know how that happened for you.

DOMINIQUE Yeah. You know, before you and I had a conversation, I got a text from my former boss at a theater I used to work at when I was an artistic fellow. And he was like: “Have you heard of Trouble in Mind?” And to set the scene, it’s like maybe 11:30 PM at night, and he’s like have you ever read Trouble in Mind? And I was like “no,” thinking it was a new play. And I was like, “When was it published?” And he was like, 1954. And he was like this play was written by this writer named Alice Childress. We are failed because we; right, like it's a failure that you don't know who she is, in the same way I didn't know who she is. And I was like, I don’t like that; I really didn't like that, especially because I had spent a lot of my time in college really dedicated to doing plays by black writers, other writers of color. But one of the things I sort of didn’t do, I didn't do a lot of older plays. I think the oldest play I ever directed then was a presentation of The Colored Museum. So, I sort of immediately knew when he said that, I was like there's something missing in my own education that I need to correct. And so then got involved with Classix. Met you. Had that conversation. No, sorry, even before that, it had turned out that my dad had read stage directions for a reading of Trouble in Mind at a theater in Dallas, and so he still had his scripts. And so, it was like so serendipitous because he was coming up. He brought his binder with him, and I sat in his hotel room while he slept and just read that play three times.

ARMINDA
Oh, I love that.

DOMINIQUE And I was like, this is the best thing I've ever read; there's no, there’s nothing else but this play. Trouble in Mind is definitive; it's it. Why have I never read this play before? And then Classix happened; we met; and I think from talking to you, the thing that really fascinated me was the way in which Trouble in Mind didn't move, right? The way it was supposed to move; the way it didn’t move; the way it gets really disappeared. And I was just sort of, to myself I was like, if this has vanished, what are the other things? And so I spent a lot of time just reading every play of hers that I could because I really immediately was like this is someone whose plays I want to be directing. And it doesn’t feel right that I just read one; I should be able to talk about an entire body of work. I should be able to talk about Alice Childress’ canon, if I even want to approach doing these plays, right? And just talking to you was so helpful, too, because it’s like there are, it’s the thing about like moving to New York and being able to go to the Schomburg, right? There are so many plays in that place that just don't see the light of day, and so many plays by these titans and legends that we don't know about. And that for me was really exciting because it’s like there are so many black plays I just want to be working on; I could work on a black play for the rest of my life, by a different writer every year, and just be happy. But with Childress it was like this woman is a genius kind of, and there are some writers that I am told are geniuses that I don't think are doing a third of what she's doing in her plays. And so, I knew very instinctively, I was like, I want to be doing this woman's plays. And the more I learned about her, her interest in, you know, communism; her interest in at times like philosophy because I think a lot of her work is really, lends itself to theoretical interpretations. I was just like, this is such fruitful ground, and there's so much to be mined from these words.

And I remember I did a reading of Trouble in Mind, and then I got to do a day-long workshop of it at the National BlackTheatre. And all of the actors in the room were like: Oh, this is it; it’s like we don't want to do anything else. Can this go into production tomorrow? You know what I mean? And so she for me has just been such a door; you were the door to her, and then she has opened so many doors for me about thinking about the sort of plays I want to direct. And I think, I think Alice Childress represented a really big shift for me personally away from just thinking about new plays, and being really committed to being a director who directs revivals, a very specific type of revival.

ARMINDA
Right. Right. I think for me, Alice Childress was the reason there needed to be Classix, not the only reason there needed to be Classix…

DOMINIQUE Absolutely.

ARMINDA
…obviously, not the only reason, but kind of the archetype of the reason there needs to be Classix because, because she's so embedded in the history of black theater.

DOMINIQUE
Absolutely.

ARMINDA
She's kind of intersecting with all of these moments, deeply involved, and not just black theater, but kind of black theater communities, the history of all of these little conflicts and deeply affiliated with so many people who have gone on to be better known, you know. Sidney Poitier credited her with introducing him to Paul Robeson, credited her with introducing him to what it was to think about being an activist, what it was to really think about black people and the condition of black people and what artists could do about it. She did so much writing. Particularly in the 50s, she was so instrumental in trying to build up a black community theater. She has this article where she talks about the need for a strong Negro Theater that is, embedded in the tradition of, of black arts that is Pan Africanic in scope–that also allies with and and learns from and is interested with other ethnic theaters like Yiddish theater. She was very appreciative of Chinese theater, you know, she really saw clearly, this need to to continue kind of investigating black history and black culture through the arts and advocating for black artists. The Committee for the Negro and the Arts was a group that had already been formed. But she was the leader of the theater unit of that and helped to establish this, this theater in a nightclub called Club Baron in Harlem, it was the first place where actors got paid at union scale because the American Negro Theater had been volunteer and she's like, well, yes, but how do we do this and support? And then advocating for jobs, for jobs on Broadway. She saw, like, clearly the need in the ways that you know, we, we think about now, right? We think about now how are we going to get more representation on Broadway? Yes, Alice Childress on Broadway. Yes. All of that, but also recognizing that … in our theaters is where the work happens.

DOMINIQUE Right.

ARMINDA
Right. And, and that … if you lose that there's something that is really majorly lost.

DOMINIQUE Yeah. And I think that that is also a part of it, reading about someone who was so, I think, labor specifically for the, right, like black theater at large and then also specifically labor focused, right. Like figuring out the wait, what it takes to bring the union uptown, figuring out how to make sure that people are being paid. And it just feels like she was so, like you just said she was so instrumental. And I was like, there are even more reasons to know her right then. She seems so important to what was happening wherever she was, and it feels like a real disservice to not know what she was doing and to not be aware of who she is and why she did what she was doing. Because it sometimes feels to me like those sorts of things get, you just focus on the art and not about also how the person was moving. I think we see this with Lorraine Hansberry, where it's just like, we're only going to talk about A Raisin in the Sun for a very long time until someone that's a little black woman is, like, wait a minute, we need to contextualize this a little bit more. Right? And I think that opened a lot of doors for me in thinking about not only theater, but I think where I was at the time about what theater can do; what it can't do; and what the way that history erases maybe some of the more important things it can do.

ARMINDA
Also I think one thing that's really interesting and fascinating for me is the amount theater that speaks to our times, right? Her times were in such … flux, and she has pieces that speak to all aspects of that. So you have Trouble in Mind, which is very much at a time when progressives, I mean, this is a play kind of about white allyship, right, in the arts and what it looks like, um, when there's not balance in that, right? So when, when your allies take over… how does that work? It's giving you a setting for what that time is. And then you have Wedding Band, which goes back in time, but is still telling you about 1966,1970, talking about allyship again, right, but also interracial marriage, but also building communities, right? And also, how black women are kind of bound by the law in specific ways that are detrimental to them and to their children and to…society at large. Because when… that happens, that … is a rot; that rots from the inside out, right? And … it's fascinating to go into the layers of the ways that … you know, that that rot is everybody's rot, right? And then you have Wine in the Wilderness, which is very much a Black Arts Movement piece, right? In conversation … with–we're not going to call it Hotepness, because that's so pejorative–but it's, you know, but in conversation with–

DOMINIQUE –with a particular type of black masculinity. Right? I think. A particular type of black masculinity that presumes it knows what the best representation of black women, feminine or otherwise, must be.

ARMINDA
Thank you. Yes, exactly that. And then Mojo also … on a micro level, and then String, which is an adaptation of a Maupassant play … but is so grounded in the the ways that I think the ways that the black community was kind of splintering … post integration…. [S]he saw how to how to take that that old French piece and bring it into in the late 1960s, 1970s, and and show where the splinters are when we prioritize , um, money, when we associate having made it with success, and when you have the the downfall of aspirational classes to to the community at large. And while she would not at that point have called it Marxist probably because it was no longer politically viable to do so, it is what it is, right? Right. And then beyond that, you know, she has this whole other career as a writer, as a novelist. And, in fact, … when she died, the New York Times said she was a novelist. But the thing that she was most famous for was the book A Hero Ain't Nothing but a Sandwich, which is a young adult novel about, about a kid who's addicted to heroin, and that got turned into a movie starring Cicely Tyson and, you know, it kind of moved her into the conversation in a different way. And yet, she says that when she wrote it, it's really a series of monologues. So, she thought about that piece as an extended play, but because theater kind of could not contain her, or she or she could not deal with the containment that became necessary and had to find other ways to try to express. And then, though she considered herself a Harlemite, she was born in Charleston, South Carolina. And she was raised by her grandmother, who, moved to New York, but had like Carolina in her bones and told her all these stories, sometimes reluctantly, but all of these stories that just embedded themselves in her in a way that she, she really had a deep affiliation and understanding of that place. And, and she said her stepfather was Gullah. So, … it's a great migration story.

DOMINIQUE Yeah.

ARMINDA So much of history is encompassed in, in her and in her work.

DOMINIQUE Thank you for saying that. I mean, yeah, that's one of the things, and I know you are also a fellow southerner. That's one of the other things too, for me, is like, the way that, especially in Trouble in Mind, in a Wedding Band, in Wine in the Wilderness, the way that geography is also splintering, right, the way that there are some characters across all those plays, even with Wedding Band characters who are in the south, that are like, you know, “those people,” like this is the way that “those people” would act. If this is the way “those people” would say it, we have to say it that way, right? And it's like, you know, there's a rich geography down there; chill out. And that's, and that's always the sort of pushback that she's making, right? Those are not just “those people”; we are “those people” too. And that sort of real connectivity, I think, especially for me, who moved to the north and was like: oh, y'all hate the south.

ARMINDA Right?

DOMINIQUE And … it's one of those things where … before moving here, I was never someone who would defend it. It's like, I just live here. You know what I mean? I live here. These are my folks. And you get here and it's like, oh, you hate these people.

ARMINDA
I am these people. Yes. Yes.

DOMINIQUE And now I'm gonna stand in the seed of, like, these invisible black people that you want to shadowbox, right? And I every time I engage with one of her plays, I'm thinking about that, right? I'm thinking about it in Wine in the Wilderness. Every time Tommie gets put down, because of the way she talks.

ARMINDA
Right, right. Yes.

DOMINIQUE And the way that she is able to deal with that real sort of intra-community complexity, I think is so important, especially just in those, when she makes that pivot to writing all black plays, it’s just so rich and so fruitful. And so, everybody's not doing it like that. I think everyone will try to say

ARMINDA
Absolutely, yeah. I relate to and recognize that and as you bring it up, I think that I think you've articulated something that I have felt but not quite articulated for myself as a connection which is, that feeling seen. I feel like I may be … a little assimilated into northernness

DOMINIQUE It's easy to do though, right, and that’s not to, especially here, right, especially in New York City. I love the way New Yorkers talk. But it is sometimes just like the, it's an attitude thing. It's the every time I tell you, I'm from Texas. It's the: oh, I'm so sorry. Wait, hold on. Stop. What are you sorry for?

ARMINDA
Exactly, exactly, yes, I used to tell people I was from Memphis, and they talked to me about cows.

DOMINIQUE
Every time I engage with one of her plays I’m just, like, thank you for, and it's because, right like, she, regardless of the generational, she is southern, and the connection she has to the South I think in the real the way that she sees it as a real class issue is always so refreshing to like, just go back to, because it reminds me of my granny; reminds me of my momma; it reminds me of the family I had that is, that lived there. And me, myself, and in that way, and I think it's always just so refreshing. Every time she, just like, she tackles it head-on for what it is.

ARMINDA
I mean, and I mean, and obviously connected to herself, too, because she did not, she did not finish high school. Her life did not work that way. Her daughter was the first person to go to college and complete college and in their whole, matriarchal line. But she took on from her grandmother, this idea that you can teach yourself; that your life can be led by your curiosity, and that you can become all these things. You can create stories; you can tell stories, you can be a writer, you can be a thinker. You just need to go pursue it.

DOMINIQUE
Right.

ARMINDA Right?

DOMINIQUE I mean, that is so much the thing I love about Wine in the Wilderness. Right? Is that sometimes the people who have the history have it orally

ARMINDA Yes.

DOMINIQUE Right? That Tommie is the, is the keeper of history, right? She just has an oral tradition versus a tradition of writing it down. And that the oral tradition is just as … valid, is just as okay. And that that too is a kind of education.

ARMINDA Right.

DOMINIQUE Especially compared to Bill in that play, who is, you know, a smart black man.

ARMINDA
And in his head, going back to Trouble in Mind, you know, you have John who has training and studied and feels like he knows more than these other people who have come up and been in these shows and maybe Chitlin Circuit and maybe, you know, play maids on Broadway and Off Broadway and doing, you know, but came with aspirations and understands how the system works and can tell you this is about to go down. Can tell you how this is about to go down. And yet she allows that there's something to be learned from them, right? So, Wiletta learns something from John. Even though he's a little callous, he has something for her; they have something they have something for each other. Tommie has something for Bill, and Bill has something for her. They teach each other, and she points out the things that fracture, the things that are toxic in a community. But she does not dismiss the people and the possibility for for unification, the possibility too that we can … figure our stuff out and and grow from one another, which I think is what's incredibly generous, and it's something I'm trying to carry forward, right?

DOMINIQUE
It also, I think it maybe bears saying for everyone listening. I think Arminda has dramaturged three Childress plays?

ARMINDA
As either, as readings or productions I have.

DOMINIQUE
Arminda was the dramaturg for the production of Wedding Band, as directed by the illustrious Awoye Timpo at TFANA. The two of them also worked together on a reading of Trouble in Mind out in California. Arminda was my dramaturg when I directed Wine in the Wilderness in Roundabout. So, if it feels like there's a real sort of knowledge that you're hearing; it's because she's worked on a lot of plays.

ARMINDA
I want to do more right. … I'm planning and scheming and trying to figure out how to, how to get some more, how to get some more done, as you know.

DOMINIQUE
Like I said, if the goal for me really is to, by the time this career is over, if I have directed every one of her plays, I'll be out. You'll never need to hear from me again. I need to direct every Alice Childress play, and I will be completely happy.

ARMINDA
Yeah. Well, there's something about the ability to live in the work a little . I really feel that, and I am a fan of many people's work … but I don't think I've encountered someone whose work I really just want to live in for a while. Yeah, I think that must be how Ruben Santiago Hudson feels about August Wilson. You just want to live there. And I love August Wilson, but I want to live in Alice Childress’ work.

DOMINIQUE
Right? There's something about the feeling, even though she is gone, the ability to sit beside her for a second. And to watch her build this thing out. And every time I hear one of the plays, I mean, I remember hearing Wedding Band out loud for the first time and just being, like this woman is on something. She’s … on a different; there’s something going on in there. And it's just, it’s every time. It's like, Hooray! It's a new, it's a new breath in the lungs that gets me excited all over again.

DOMINIQUE One thing that I'm really curious about is the sort of level of…the level of knowledge about Childress sort of depending sometimes on the attendance of, like, a PWI versus an HBCU. Because I feel like one of the…one of the best things I've experienced about working with CLASSIX, right, um, is that feeling…Like when we do a reading–like when we did WEDDING BAND at TFANA, when it was a reading–is just the fact there are always, there's always like a Black person in the audience who either did one of two things: who is like “I read this play when I was in college, at the HBCU I went to,” or they were like, “I remember when this play happened.” And I love both of those things so much. It always makes me so happy. And so I'm curious if in the sort of time you’ve spent thinking about Childress and writing about Childress as you have, if you notice that sort of disparity.

ARMINDA Yes, yes, I have. And I think that one of the things that's…that it helps me to do, because I come from the, you know, the woefully under-informed, PWI pathway, so this is gonna sound unkind [laughter], many of the, of the Black writers that I discovered in terms of theater, were, you know, probably accidental. You know, it didn't happen because, because it was in my curriculum. And, and it was, to be fair, a small PWI. So you didn't have Black theater studies, per se, particularly at that time. You can, graduate with a bachelor's in theater and go and get a master's in theater and never come across Alice Childress, which is shameful. I did that whole thing and never came across Adrienne Kennedy, which was shameful. I just barely came across Lorraine Hansberry. But we go into these rehearsal processes, not just the readings, but the rehearsal process. And one of the actors that we had the reading with, was like, “oh, yeah, I…I interviewed Alice Childress.” I mean, just…my age… “I interviewed Alice Childress.” And so I think it's really important to remember–because, when we're feeling all heady with discovery, you know, that the things that we are discovering are not, are not things that are hidden. Sometimes my discovery is somebody's “old hat.” And I think that's the thing that I keep learning, you know, that even if I'm just discovering it at 50…something, that somebody else read this in high school somebody else read this in college, this was already this was part of their foundation. And so I am just humbled and awed. And I think that that's important to the work that we do. There are things that we present and we go, “hey, you know, this is what we're learning; this is what we're discovering.” And it's going to be new for a lot of people. But, we're able to do it, because so many people have already trod this path. it's been left for us to pick up and carry on. It's not–it's not new, it's just we're…this is information that we're, that we're just trying to keep moving forward.

DOMINIQUE Yeah, and it might be a personal discovery, but there is always someone who has known and had been trying to toil the land for as long as–right before the time you discovered. And to me, at least, that's one of the exciting things because it's like, there's a place to build from. That I am not just sort of playing in this dirt trying to plant seeds, but the seeds have already been planted. It is now my job to water them. And to maybe help other people find the garden in the same way I found the garden.

ARMINDA Yes! And thank you for saying that in like four sentences, what I just took ten minutes to say. I really appreciate that, really. [Laughter]

ALICE CHILDRESS CLIP (Working in the Theater) Well. I was working as an actress with the American Negro Theatre. And we did great many productions. But we wanted original work. And I became interested in writing to do original things for us. And of course, I acted on Broadway in Anna Lucasta and things we did there then. But looking for new work and scenes, I’d start out with one act plays and then did other things and Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band and a great many plays. People began to expect plays from me. And I also felt I could create more there than as an actress. Because you could start at the beginning. And I feel when I've written a play that I've acted all the parts first.

PANEL MODERATOR You probably have.

CHILDRESS Yes, I did as I was writing them. But I also enjoy being an actress and I have done directing, creating something for other people to have. I remember Harriet Tubman who freed people during slavery, Underground Railroad, she said she always wanted an apple orchard and she didn't have one and it was such a pleasure to plant a tree that would give apples to others - meaning her work. And I feel that way about what I've done. I tried to write the kinds of roles that I felt we didn't have as much of an opportunity to play. And so I - it seemed to me directing and acting in any part of theater was a joy. And in writing books, I use theater technique and carry the theater to a book. I see writing a book in terms of scenes. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich was in scenes and also Rainbow Jordan in A Short Walk and things that theater is such a real and fascinating and deep and wonderful place to be that once in it I don't see how people can get away from it.

DOMINIQUE
So Arminda we're talking so much about her plays and her work. As we both know, Trouble in Mind just premiered on Broadway. It was wonderful to finally see that play on a stage … as big as the American Airlines. But it took a very long time for it to get there, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the way Trouble in Mind, you know, supposed to be the first play by black woman on Broadway, pre- Raisin vanishes.

ARMINDA
Right? So, Trouble in Mind is was, you know, Alice Childress’ first full-length play, and it was produced downtown. We would still call it Off Broadway. It was produced at a place called the Greenwich Mews, which was like, they were really progressive. I mean, they had colorblind casting before there was colorblind casting, but they also produced plays written by African Americans. They had produced William Branch’s In Splendid Error, I think, the year before they produced Trouble in Mind. And one of the people in the creative staff of Greenwich Mews–was Oceola Archer, who had been an acting teacher for the American Negro Theatre, which may have been one of Childress’ ways into this place.

ARMINDA
Brown versus Board is “54. They were in rehearsals, basically, when Emmett Till was murdered. So, Greenwich Mews produced this, the piece in ‘55. And it kind of actually mirrored the play itself. It became a very meta experience because it was originally a two act piece, which is the piece that we saw. And Greenwich Mews, halfway through the rehearsal process, demanded a third act because they, could not accept that the white allies, the director, was going to walk out, that they weren't going to learn and have a redemptive moment. So they had her create this whole redemptive arc, and at the end, they sang We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder together. You know, it was it was a very feel-good thing. And that version was popular with audiences. It did get some pushback; there was some allusion to the third act being kind of hackneyed. But it was still a good piece…. It was successfully received, and it was optioned for Broadway very quickly. So there was an announcement made that it was going to be produced in 1957, and she was working towards that. But the producers who were going to take it to Broadway– wanted more changes, and then more changes, and then more changes. And so, she, she found that she had just lost control of her piece, that it was no longer the thing that she recognized. It was certainly no longer the thing that she wanted to say. And so she pulled it. So, that's the story of that. It doesn't happen for her and, and Lorraine Hansberry who she knew.They work together at Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper and worked on the script together there, of a pageant that went up in 1952. …. But then we had almost exactly the same process repeat itself. A few years down the pike, she did a reading of Wedding Band. The first reading of Wedding Band happened in 1963 at the Dramatists Guild, and it went very well. …It went up in like October, and in January, there was an announcement in the New York Times that it was going to be produced on Broadway that fall. And Diana Sands was going to star. And so it's, you know, yay, happy joy, but then it starts to get those notes again where it's: if only Herman had a bigger role; if only we knew more about Herman; if only we saw more of Herman’s family; and does Herman have to die? If this play could be just a little bit more about Herman, a little bit less about this woman and these other women and this yard. And having already learned her lesson, it just shut down. But so we have this piece where the first reading is in 1963. It then is produced in Ann Arbor, as a kind of as a production that they think will probably get it back to Broadway in 1966. That doesn't happen. And then there's another production that's supposed to happen in Atlanta in 1968, and the … board of directors for that theater actually bankrupted the theater, shut it down, and then … re-formed it with the same artistic director… and no, we're not talking about this play anymore. Yes…

DOMINIQUE
I did not know that.

ARMINDA
And then it got produced in 1972, in Chicago. And then finally, it went to the … Public Theater in 1972. That whole journey…from 63 to 72, that's nine years before …it gets seen in New York. And in that time, Wine in the Wilderness had already been produced, String had already been produced.

DOMINIQUE:
Yeah, I can't believe, I mean, I can believe because of the way anti-blackness works, but to bankrupt your own theater and then re-form it, and just be like, we don't know what play you're talking about. So that's, yeah, that's a lot.

ARMINDA
Abbey Lincoln was supposed to star in that play. Because I think at that point Ruby Dee was doing Peyton Place, so she was unavailable. But you know, it had a cast; it had a lot of enthusiasm. There was a lot of writing leading up to this piece happening. Abbey Lincoln did some stage reading. With Alice Childress; I think that there are clips of that on YouTube. It was going to happen; it was going to happen, and then suddenly, this theater is gone. And then a couple of months later, here's this theater back with a slightly different name and no Wedding Band.

DOMINIQUE
I just gotta sit here for a second. Oh, my goodness. Wow!

ARMINDA
Yeah, that's the thing we discovered while we were working on it,

DOMINIQUE
While you were working on it, yeah.

ARMINDA
And yet she keeps working. I mean, because that would make me crazy. It may be, it may be the thing that made her say, let me write a book.

DOMINIQUE
Right, because you got two back to back with Trouble and Wedding Band …for similar but different reasons, right? And that's the thing that's so tough. I think about the Trouble in Mind story to me, is that it's easy to just sort of be like, oh, the reason this third act exists is because of some people she didn't know who were producers who thought it will be better, right? When it's like actually no, the people that demanded this sort of reconciliation coalition thing are her friends, are people she works with, people that, like, claim to understand her, right? And they think that the message needs to be one of racial reconciliation, and it's like, I don't know if that's what that play is doing. Manners singing Jacob's Ladder at the end of the play does what it needs, accomplishes the goal,

ARMINDA Right.

DOMINIQUE Yeah.

ARMINDA It’s the power struggle that isn't being recognized in the play until the very end. And then isn't necessarily being recognized in real life? And she had this thing where she talked about, you know, you feel like you're in the middle of something. The actors are depending on it; the crew’s depending on you. There's a whole thing in motion here. And you, you start to second guess yourself; maybe, maybe this is okay, and also, she's a fairly young playwright at the time. I mean, she wrote her first play in 1949, on a dare she says. …That's the way it's handed down to us that she had a complaint about the lack of quality roles for women in ANT, and also about the dearth of plays being written actually, at that point by black authors. And she got challenged to do something, and she brought it in a couple of days. And that was Florence, so she does this, and then she's done. And then she moves, and then American Negro Theater eventually folds, and she transitions to Club Baron and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts Theater Project. And she does, Just a Little Simple which is a musical adaptation of Langston Hughes's character, Jesse B. Simple, and that is so popular that he gets the idea to do it himself. And his goes on Broadway. But you know, she does that, and then she does this piece called Gold Through the Trees, which incorporates music and dance it’s dealing with not just African American history, but … African diasporic history. So, … it has Harriet Tubman; it has a woman in Haiti; it has South Africa. This is 1952. I don't know that we understand how we've consistently been encouraged to be Pan Africanic in scope. Do you know what I mean? I think

DOMINIQUE Yeah

ARMINDA …I think we always feel like that's a more recent thing. And it's not a more recent thing.

DOMINIQUE At all.

ARMINDA As we discovered when we talked about In Dahomey. Right?

DOMINIQUE Right.

ARMINDA But those were the things she had written before she got to Trouble in Mind. So she comes out with such a clear vision. It's just … incredible to think about and to…witness and to read through.

DOMINIQUE
I feel like one of the hardest things in terms of thinking about Alice Childress is actually sort of finding ways for her to talk about herself. Because every time you read an interview. And so I'm wondering for you, as someone who's, who is so deeply defined by a relationship to research, how has that been difficult?

ARMINDA
Well, I mean, the first time I started to try to build a biography, for Childress, one of the first things you run into is nobody can agree on the year she was born. There were some who said 1916; there were some who said 1920. 1920 was the year that she gave, right? But when you have so many conflicting pieces of information, it's very hard. And part of that is that she was vague for reasons that we understand, which is women who are performers during that time as she has Wiletta say, “A woman who will tell her age will tell anything.” And a woman who tells her age on the stage, is …limiting her career. But then because she was mum about that, it also caused her, I think, to downplay her early experiences. So, it's hard to get a feel for when she started as a performer. A little later, she talks with Kathy Perkins about Venzella Jones, who ran the Negro Youth Theatre Unit during the Federal Theater Project. So we know that she had some experience in the 30s. She was also a young mother in the 30s. There's a conference - Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE). The year before she died, they honored her, and she gives a speech and she talks about starting out. She says that her first, she tells a story about her first paying job in the theater was while she was in Mississippi researching, uh, Bessie Smith, talking to people about Bessie Smith. Well, Bessie Smith died in 1934. But we know that when she got to the American Negro Theater, she was considered someone with experience, right? So though that is really her launching point in 1941, she joins the American Negro Theatre, I think. So it starts in ‘40, but she joined in ‘41, with Alvin Childress, whom she was married to at the time. And that launches her career, but she's already, she feels fully formed.

DOMINIQUE Right?

ARMINDA You know, she becomes a teacher pretty quickly; she becomes a director pretty quickly in that theater; she becomes somebody that people look up to. But we don't get the backstory of why that is because she's not interested in her age being known.

DOMINIQUE
Right.

RIDER I was just wondering if you could maybe talk about some of the ways she hid herself, and what she was sort of up to during those periods.

ARMINDA I think one of the things that's really interesting is she started out as a performer, right? So for Anna Lucasta; and she was a scene stealer. There was a lot of attention that was given to her performance, even though she wasn't a lead. And then she shifted. So she's somebody who kind of moves herself out of the spotlight. So she she took a kind of behind the scenes leadership at American Negro Theatre. So I think that there's, there's something about that she–that she was not a limelight-seeker, necessarily. Which is not to say that she didn't want to work to be recognized in a way that I think made it a little harder to see where she is. It makes it harder to locate her.

DOMINIQUE Right.

And that’s the adventure we’re on and are excited to explore in this podcast. Next week we’ll talk to Kathy Perkins… Thank you so much, Arminda, for being here. And thank you all for listening in. This has been the first episode of Act Two of the Reclamation podcast. Our sound editor is the wonderful Audrey Dube. The theme song was composed by Alphonso Horne. For more information on Alice Childress, please visit The Classix– with an x–.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We'll see you next week.