EPISODE 6

+ TRANSCRIPT

ZACHARIAH EZER My name is Zachariah Ezer. Alice Childress is more important than Shakespeare. She has unbelievable technical skill, a real sense of emotionality. And it's very possible that she can see into the future. At least it looks like that when you write about blackness the way that she does. She also has my absolute favorite line in the theater. In Trouble In Mind, my favorite play, when John says he plans to go right to the top and Wiletta asks him “And where do you think I was planning to go?” Gets me every time

DOMINIQUE RIDER Hey, everybody, welcome back to the CLASSIX podcast, (re)clamation, an intervention in the current conversation around theatre history, where we recenter and uplift the Black writers and storytellers of the American theatre - both the celebrated and the forgotten. I’m Dominique Rider and we’ve reached the conclusion of our journey and exploration of life, work, and legacy of Alice Childress.

As we bring this act to a close we asked friends and colleagues to speak on what Alice Childress means to them?

JOHN SCUTCHINS My name is John Eric Scutchins. Director, stage manager. My favorite Alice Childress play is Trouble In Mind. This story is bold, raw, heartfelt and rebellious. It reads like a black manifesto for artistic freedom. I stand on the shoulders of this brilliant, brilliant play.

PASCALE ARMAND Pascal Armand, my favorite Allis Childress play is Wine in the Wilderness. It holds a special place in my heart because it was the very first play that I had ever performed in. I was in my junior year in college, and I got the role of Tommy. I auditioned for it, and - I auditioned to be in the play. And I got Tommy and was ecstatic. And when I got down to reading the material, for me, it seemed to be like a bird's eye view into what it was going to be like to be a Black woman in America, I was, again, a junior in undergrad, I'm like mad young. I didn't know what I was in for. But this piece of literature was letting me know. Like, these are the things that are going to have to be considered as you move through this world. It celebrated, it seriously contemplated, and it revered a Black woman's life. Yeah, it's hard. But then, the other side of that coin is that there is beauty to it. And so at this point, I had, you know, jumped into the artistic pool, but I'm glad that this is the play that got me into the waters. Because I saw a reflection of myself in this work.

DOMINIQUE We also had longer conversations with Georgetown professor and scholar Soyica Colbert and actor and writer Donnetta Lavinia Grays.

Here’s the conversation Arminda, Awoye and I had with Soyica Colbert.

DOMINIQUE I think the thing that I’m always trying to figure out about a lot of black dramatists is not just their theatrical interests, but also their theoretic interests. Thinking about how it seems, especially in the current landscape of the American theatre, there is this really big disconnect between Black Studies as a place of thought; Black Studies as a place of theorizing; and art that is influenced by or created by theory. I'm curious about when you're teaching these plays, when you're teaching about these writers, how you talk about that.

SOYICA I try to draw attention to the philosophical, cultural, and social context that playwrights are writing in. If you think about someone like Childress, or Hansberry, they're both writing out of a Marxist tradition that is informed by black radicalism, specifically, and that comes alive in the material conditions of the world that they're presenting to us. In my most recent work, I'm in a conversation with a group of scholars and thinking about how some of the conversation about existentialism (which was predominant in the theater world in the mid- 20th century) comes up and is then thought through in different ways by artists like Childress and enhanced in very big questions around black existence, which are still very much a part of our contemporary conversations around black life and death. All those things are taken head on in her plays.

It’s clear from Childress’ writing and from Hansberry’s writing, that they're actively engaged with some of the questions around existentialism, which are just about questions around freedom, life and death, responsibility, power and authority. They're actively engaged in those conversations, but both of them are also very much invested in thinking about the material conditions of black folks. So while existentialists are primarily concerned with individual responsibility and individual freedom, Hansberry and Childress are always very clear that they're thinking about collective movements for black freedom and how that connected to worldwide movements for people of color in the world, and how they were thinking from an internationalist Marxist lens. I think that it is helpful to situate playwrights within black thought and black intellectual traditions because they do offer a specific perspective that might broadened some of our conversations both in terms of the Academy, but then also in the art world as well.

AWOYE I'm just fascinated by this notion of existentialism that you're carving out around Childress and also Hansberry and how it's kind of a shift from an individualist to something that's more about community, which is something we talk about a lot in Classix—in relationships to black minstrelsy, in relationship to Bill Gunn and Kathleen Collins. Certainly we’re thinking about it a lot in the work of Alice Childress. We’re about do Wedding Band as well. Can you talk a little bit more about what you think that meant to her and what are the philosophies that she's pulling from, drawing from, and activating in her work?

SOYICA One of the things that's important and exciting about her work, and how it spans from the philosophical to the artistic, is you see this understanding of possibility, of what is possible, being articulated as a collective struggle. Even if it is enacted though an individual character’s ability to make an affirmative act or to do something positive, it's always understood or depicted as that being linked to other people in the world of the play and the larger understanding of the world as it's being created. One of the things that is useful is that the characters are never operating outside of history. And so that's something that I think Childress and Hansberry—and Childress specifically, as a Marxist, is expanding on what the existentialist is doing, because existentialists are thinking about the individual's ability to assert themselves in the world, and the responsibility that appears therein. For the most part, Sartre, Camus are thinking about the extent or the lifespan of an individual as being the poles of that assertion. Childress, on the other hand, is thinking about how an individual's life is connected to other people in a historical context. And that movements for freedom are elaborated over time. So, an individual's ability to assert themselves in the world is connected to what the possibilities will be in the future. For example, when Childress decides not to change the ending of her play, she's not just impacting her own position within theatre history, but how theater history unfolds. That’s why I think it's helpful to know that Childress was engaged with the Left but also operating out of a black radical tradition which was always thinking about the intersection of race and class—and when you're dealing with the artists like Childress, gender, as well—and how that emerges in relationship to material conditions; how that emerges in relationship to labor. We're thinking about labor; we're always having to think in terms of gender, race, and class, and how that emerges on a day-to-day basis and informs our ability to move in the world.

AWOYE Dominique mentioned this idea of danger in Trouble in Mind at the time what do you think the ways that that danger exists both then and now?

SOYICA I guess we can think about this in two ways. I think the play is dangerous because it's so frank about the racism that exists in American theater, and it requires an industry that likes to think of itself as being progressive to take a closer look at itself and to do some introspective work. Another danger is that one could encounter the play in 2022 and think that it's not about the present—that it is telling us a story about how things used to be; that we moved forward from there; and it’s a quaint recollection of what life was before we became more self-aware. I think that was a concern that I had about how the play would be received in its most recent production in New York. I think, fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case, and it's nice that the play emerged alongside a larger conversation in American theater about racism. I wrote a piece about the Broadway production in the Washington Post, and one of the quotes that that did not make it into the piece, but which I wish had, was from Kathy Perkins [sp]. I asked her what Childress would think about the play finally being on Broadway, and she said she [Childress] would have been happy that the play was receiving a wider audience, but she would have been distraught by the fact that it took the death of a black man for it to happen. So, the context of anti-black violence being a through line, certainly from Childress’ period to now, but certainly from black people's existence in the Americas, is something that also makes the play dangerous and important for our consideration. Thinking about the anti-black violence that is both, arguably enabling the production history most recently, but then also the anti-black violence, both quotidian and more deadly, that's referenced within the play itself. It’s certainly a part of the world that Childress is inhabiting.

DOMINIQUE Here’s a reflection from Aaron Coleman and Brittany Allen.

AARON COLEMAN So I love the plays of Alice Childress. I first read them in an anthology in 2020. And they hit like a bolt of lightning. How could I have gone through my entire adult life, never having read one of her remarkable plays much less heard of her, but I knew why. It's the way her characters spoke with brutal honesty about the white characters in the play. Very raw to raw for the nation's white theatrical institutions. Now, these are the plays I wish I had read in college when I was first learning about the theater world. Discovering her as an adult, however, has really opened my eyes, my ears, my heart further to what's possible for Black told stories on stage. Now, there are many things I love about her work. But one of the things that I particularly love is the nuanced way she depicts relationships between Blacks and whites. She recognizes that we must find ways to share space together and work through our attentions, similar themes that explore my own work. I love how she brings these tensions to a new level that one rarely sees in plays, particularly plays within the 20th century. Now, it's hard to pick a favorite play of hers, but I'll say a Wedding band: A Love Hate Story in Black and White. I even love that subtitle. It reveals the tenuous seesaw relationship between the races how there's love there, but there's rage and hate there at the same time, and how those two forces battle against each other. To me this play, I mean, all her plays really but this play in particular puts her on the level of a Miller of an O'Neill of an Albee among the 20th century's greatest greatest writers and she must be recognized and studied as such.

The particular moment I love in this play is when the Black wife has a vicious faceoff with her white husband's mother. Because usually when a white character throws out slurs to a Black character, the black character stand there and don't respond in an effort to be noble. You know, it makes white audiences feel better because oh no, I can't be as racist as this white woman. But here the Black woman is not silent and voices her opinions about this white woman she hurls insults back matching venomous word for venomous word. She has a voice and what seems like for the first time, we get the response of Black rage against white racism. This is refreshingly shocking. This is because a Black woman wrote this script. She challenges those old notions of respectability politics, and shows that we must be fearless in our writing about confronting racism. Most importantly, we must be unafraid to show the rage inside of us through our work. It makes for good drama, which of course makes great theatre and Childress does this throughout her work. She says things about white characters that we don't hear often in other theatrical pieces. And it's um, it's that honesty of that tension of those thoughts that enable us to work through the issues that the races face.

BRITTANY ALLEN My name is Brittany K. Allen. I am one who is livid to be late to the party of Alice Childress. Her plays are some of my favorites. And I felt this incredible prescience when I first encountered Trouble in Mind, unfortunately, very recently. I love how she engages the macro political through incredibly deep, deft, humane, wry, wise character work. She writes about race as a country structuring force with no straw man, which is incredible and still feels really rare today. The argument she puts in the mouths of her characters in for instance, Trouble in Mind emerged from real feeling people. They are clean as bones, these arguments eerily familiar. And because they feel couched in the real, plausible, actual people that actually really make space for the gut punch of the structure, she's, you know, addressing, taking down head on. In Trouble In Mind’s case, I would say that's the deep harm of racist representation. I also think she loves black people, and she writes us how we talk and think. We're not an allegory or a prop, which is uncomfortably refreshing. And that's the last thing I should say. I'm uncomfortable with how real and relevant her voice and her subjects feel today in some ways. It makes me uncomfortable. How close my corridor of inquiry feels to hers given the decades between us like, is she a soothsayer? Or are we all just really behind her? Also important to say? She's funny as hell and I just crave more of that kind of like character-emanating humor for more theater. Oh, ride or die.

DOMINIQUE I spoke with Donnetta about Childress’s impact on her artistic life.

DONNETTA LAVINIA GRAYS Yeah. So I was a student at the College of Charleston; I came into my undergrad, majored in theater. And I had a mentor there, who's still my mentor to this day, her name is Joy Vandervort-Cobb, and she had a very specifically driven…class about African American theater and African American women… playwrights. And so we read FLORENCE. And we read MOJO & STRING. And that's when I first laid eyes on the language. And it was her biography that also really, really moved me, that she was born there in Charleston, and then moved up to New York, and became a playwright and screenwriter, wrote for television. And I was like: this is amazing. This is a woman after my heart…biography led here, you know. And what I understood from her work was that she never–even though she left the south at an early age–she never lost sight of her southernness in her body. And always spoke on regular folk. And I–that's what I just kind of dove into and and recognized myself all up in there, inside of it. The sort of advocacy on the page of what it means to be a Black Southern woman, what it means to stand in the power of that, even though others might diminish it, So it felt really recognizable, her language, and her placement of Black Southern women inside of, inside of her plays. So I was–I was, I was like: oh, yes. This lady is mine right here. If I ever…if there's a roadmap, this is it. And it was so–what was so fascinating about is that once I left College of Charleston, I didn't know that other folks wouldn’t know her. And so that was always surprising to me. And it was always frustrating to me to know that she had this volume of work that, um, that people weren't–didn't have access to, you know?

DOMINIQUE What do you feel like you learned from her writing as a performer? And how you–I mean, you know, also being from the south, how you found yourself, if you have had the chance to be in one of them, how you found yourself situated in those texts?

DONNETTA Yeah, you know, what's interesting, I've never had a chance to perform Childress' work.

But you know, there are writers whose language is so familiar to you that it feels like you're in sync with it, already. Not to say that that would be an organic meeting. But it is an organic meeting in my spirit, you know? I…I write from the perspective of an actor, in everything that I do, in everything that I do. So I'm not… It's interesting…I did a play called THE REVIEW, OR HOW TO EAT YOUR OPPOSITION is a play that I wrote. And it was very cerebral and researched and everything. And then I sat down with the exhaustion of that, and said: I just need to get back to myself. And then I wrote another play that was just language from where I grew up. And the way that it flowed, you know, it felt really centered in something and–something familiar. And for me, when I pick up a Childress play, it feels kind of like that meeting. It's like I can read right through it and go, “yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes.” In the same way that that…that spirit of an actor…now, she was an actor too. So I think that's kind of the way that I meet her language too: oh my gosh, every single role, even if they are, like, somebody I do not like ultimately, I would love to say this language. I think she understands that actors love not only to take up space, but to say something gorgeous, poignant, even if they're taking up a little bit of time. Like, that language has to mean something. And it has to give us a reason for being present on stage.t I think she, her structure is such that it just, you fall into the rhythm of it, it feels really organic. To me. It feels like actor-based writing, that isn't…uh, heavy, heavy handed, or that it, like, takes all the stuff away and lets the actor do that job. You know? And that's what I really love about her too.

RIDER I'm curious about…then, with all the things you just named…I think maybe you've already given an answer, but I want to ask the question anyway. What–what continues to bring you back to her work?

DONNETTA before we kind of came together today. I reread WINE IN THE WILDERNESS. So where is WINE in this? Oh, it's, it's the last the last one, in this in this piece. So the final moment, if you remember…where Bill kind of brings all of them together, brings Sonny-man, brings–brings Cynthia and Oldtimer together and really has already kind of fallen in love and reimagined what Tommy is, right? It has this beautiful–and just bear with me while I read this, not too long–Bill says, “but you belong there in the center. Wine in the wilderness. That's who you are. The nightmare about all that I've done disappearing before my eyes, it was a good nightmare. I was painting in the dark, all head, no heart. I couldn't see until you came, baby. Look at Tomorrow, she came through the biggest riot of all, somethin’ called slavery. And she's even coming through the now scene. Folks laughing at her. Even her own folks laughing at her. And look how, with her head high, like she's popping her fingers at the world. Oh, let me put it down Tommy, wine in the wilderness. You got to let me put it down. So all the little boys and girls can look up and see you on the wall. You know what they’re gonna say? Hey, don't you look like somebody we know? And they'll be right. You’re somebody they know.” That's why…because she understands this thing about…sort of, where I come from. Listen, I have conversations with people. I say, “I'm from South Carolina” and they go [sharp inhale] “Ooh…” And I'm like: you ever been down South? I say: when you talk about the South, you’re talking about Black folk. You're talking–you have to talk about a complete picture of the South. You can't just talk about the things that hold you back. There's a reason–I always tell people I was not made in New York.

This is where I stay to. I became an actor in South Carolina, I became a writer in South Carolina. And it is this woman, that she can see…this Tommy, who comes in with her mismatched clothes on and in the rain and tattered and bobby socks and all…that she sees her humanity and demands that she be placed at the center. She talks about her history, how she come up from Georgia and how she identifies with her southern roots, even though she lives in Harlem. That's why I come back to Alice Childress' work because she remembers me. There's there's rarely a playwright who remembers me, you know, and says: oh, you good, I come to–I came to New York and, you know, have found myself sometimes just outside of the conversation, especially when it comes to representations of what Black Souther…isms are, it's always placed in a very specific time…you know. And, you know, it's a, you know, two points in history, and not a contemporary look of–about what the Black south is, sometimes.

And so sometimes I feel like of myself as just outside of it. And I think what Alice Childress does, is she, she doesn't let us get away with it. She was like…where do you think y’all came from? What–I mean, there's Great Migration, but y’all ain’t…you still–you still–we still part of a whole. Don't undervalue these people with what you migh t call broken language that is real, rich, beautiful poetic language. Don't underestimate what that is. Don't underestimate that these people–or don't devalue that these people are still close to their roots of who they are. That they live off the land; that they are…they work with their hands. You know?

I had a conversation with a writer a few months ago, she's an older lady, and we were kind of vibing off of what it meant to be a…Black Southern writer. She's a novelist and poet. And the conversation got to how we identify as Southern writers. And this kind of pride that we have, that we sometimes are not allowed to have, because the value of that kind of art…you know, is stripped away, because you come to…I came to New York, and that was sort of like tamped down. It's like a: we can't really hold that. But there is a pride that I have in being, um, a descendant of someone whose blood is in the soil. You know? And I think that's what Childress brings me back to; she reminds me of this, like, actually, we made this thing called America. Don't deny us our art as well, don't deny us our voice, just because it doesn't sound like the Queen's language. There's power in it. There's power in, um, Southern language. Right?

DOMINIQUE Absolutely. It's beautiful. When you hear the story of Childress’s life, or I think maybe sometimes the holes in the story of Childress’ life, what resonates with you?

DONNETTA Well, like I said, her biography is something I feel like…pretty sync–in sync with. But I love the fact that I believe she was raised by her grandmother.

DOMINIQUE Mm-hmm. And so…another thing that she kind of gave me permission to do, because I feel like I got permission, in a way, down the line of, of my writing journey. But the thing that she said out loud to me on the page, first thing, was like: you can center yourself in work. Like you can…you can be the, the one that...you can challenge yourself inside of your–inside of your work. Don't be afraid to put yourself on the line. And, and I really think that's important. Put your body on the line, if you're gonna try and like have some ideas bounce around, like put yourself at the center of it. And don't–don't, don't let it cost anybody else. Now, if you give–somebody catching strays, they catching strays, but you have to like interrogate your–yourself. But I think that because of that influence of her grandmother, who like, really, you know, pressed about education, and, you know, she had such a power, Alice Childresss did, about who she was. And, to me that–it shows up, it shows up in the work. You know, her activism, that she walked the walk. I mean, the carrot that is Broadway, oh my gosh, that she was like: nah, I'm good. You know, “I'm not changing my stuff.” You know, like, just that. I mean, she…she…she stuck to what she believed in. And so there's a greater value in that, than kind of selling yourself out, in a way. Right? And she, she loved Black people, loved us enough to challenge us. You know, and I wish we had taken…gosh, I wish we taken better care, when we had her, you know?

DOMINIQUE As I begin thinking about how to close out this act, I got asked to reflect on what I’ve learned, appreciated, and still have questions about. What feels so clear to me after months of interviews and conversation is that Alice Childress touched the lives of many people and movements in many different ways.She was a writer, an organizer, a critic, and someone who was thinking deeply about what it meant to be a Black artist during a time of deep seated repression. When I piece together what I have learned about her life, I find myself in awe and filled with a deep sense of respect. However, maybe more than that I find myself filled with a familiar type of anger. How could someone so important and prophetic disappear into the folds of history? This act has been a painful reminder of what it means to try preserving a history that The World seems intent on making sure we forget about. We continue inspite of this.

Thank you to everyone who we’ve talked to throughout this act, everyone who’s contributed their time and enthusiasm. We are so grateful.

Our sound editor is Aubrey 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. Stay tuned for Act 3 of the podcast, we’re taking a road trip, y’all!