About the Playwright
Alice Childress was an American playwright, novelist, and actress born in Charleston, South Carolina, October 12, 1916. Her father, Alonzo, worked in insurance, and her mother Florence was a seamstress. After the separation of her parents in 1925, she moved to the Harlem home of her grandmother, Eliza White, who encouraged her to write and embrace the arts. This was the at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.
Childress did not complete high school or attend college. Instead, she was entirely self-educated. As a teenager, she attended the performance of a Shakespeare production, which sparked her interest in a career in theatre. Her first mentor, Venezuela Jones, ran the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Youth Theatre program and was the first Black female playwright Childress ever met. Shirley Graham Du Bois, the wife of NAACP founder W.E.B Du Bois, also encouraged Childress to pursue writing.
In 1941, Childress joined Harlem’s American Negro Theatre as one of the founding members where she worked as an actress, stage director, personnel director, and costume designer for 11 years. While at ANT, she fought for union off-Broadway contracts that would assure advanced pay for actors. As an actress, Childress performed in a variety of New York productions, including the famed 1944 production of Anna Lucasta – the longest-running all-Black play in Broadway history, which also allegedly inspired Childress to eventually write Trouble in Mind.
In 1952, Childress became the first professionally produced Black female playwright with the production of her play Gold Through The Trees – a dramatic piece with music made up of vignettes that trace out periods of struggle from the African continent to America and back, from the time of the Middle Passage to the contemporary struggles of South Africa.
Childress received scholarly attention in her later life. Radcliffe College, where she had been an Associate Scholar from 1966 to 1968, awarded her an Alumnae Graduate Society Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1984. She received an Honorary Degree from the State University New York at Oneonta and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the State University of New York, both in 1990, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre of Higher Education in 1993. Additionally, she was the subject of multiple biographies, articles, and graduate dissertations. As a self-educated woman without a high school diploma, Childress was proud of this recognition from the academic community.
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Themes that often characterize Childress’ works includes Black female empowerment, interracial politics, working-class life, and the deconstruction of Black stereotypes. One of her most famous works, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), helped launch her career as a young adult novelist. The novel confronts social issues, like racism, drug use, teen pregnancy, and queerness. She adapted the novel into a screenplay in 1977, resulting in a film by the same name starring Cicely Tyson, Larry B. Scott, and Paul Winfield.
CONTROVERSY
On occasion, her works on Black culture and interracial relations caused controversy, some networks refusing to televise a 1969 production of Wine in the Wilderness – a play about the perception of Black women among the African American community. Additionally in 1973, networks also refused to televise the Public Theatre’s production of Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White – in which Julia, a Black seamstress, and Herman, a white baker, are unable to marry legally or love freely in a relentlessly racist world. A number of school districts and libraries even banned A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich after it was released.
ACTIVISM
While writing plays, Childress also engaged in real-world political activism. She worked with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), a Harlem-based cultural support organization, which co-sponsored some of her early productions. Childress fought for theatre artists’ rights to receive advances and guaranteed pay for union actors in Off-Broadway productions. For Freedom, a progressive Black newspaper founded by actor-activist Paul Robeson, Childress wrote a column using the persona of “Mildred,” a domestic worker who shared her experiences of racism. Together with her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, Childress founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice: a radical Black women’s civil rights group that fought against lynching, the rape of Black women by white men, Jim Crow, South African apartheid, and sexism. Childress’ association with these left-wing organizations put her on the FBI’s surveillance list for many years.
THE AMERICAN NEGRO THEATRE
The American Negro Theatre was founded on June 5, 1940, in the basement of the 135th Street Branch of The New York Public Library. Founded by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O’Neal, and other actors in Harlem. The ANT was formed in the tradition of the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program discontinued by Congress in 1939. Working with meager resources, the principal founders, along with 18 other artists, incorporated ANT as a cooperative, and all members shared in the expenses and profits. The theatre’s business model was parallel to its artistic policy of ensemble acting in lieu of individual leading roles.
Ultimately, the American Negro Theatre became one of the most influential Black theatre organizations of the 1940s, and ignited the careers of a number of famous black actors including Harry Belafonte, Alice Childress, Sidney Poitier, and Ruby Dee.
TROUBLE IN MIND
A Brief History
Trouble in Mind premiered on Nov. 5, 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, a company based in an old Presbyterian church on West 13th Street. The production ran for 91 performances.
The challenges of mounting Trouble in Mind presented themselves when another producer, a white man, insisted the ending be changed from its somewhat ambiguous, melancholic ending to a happier one for the audiences’ comfort. He threatened to cancel the run if Childress didn’t make these changes. Childress relented in order to keep the production moving forward; she changed the ending. Another challenge and ironic twist echoing the play’s plot, Childress found herself at odds with the would-be director when Trouble in Mind was slated for its Off Broadway premiere. Unwilling to budge, she took over as co-director, along with actress Clarice Taylor, who starred as Wiletta.
Childress recalls from her first rewrite challenge in an interview for The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists...
I knew I was doing the wrong thing, but at the same time I shakily felt, “Maybe I could be wrong.” When everyone around you is saying, “This is wrong,” you can grow uncertain. They may be right – or wrong...When you hear “We’re not going to do it” and “We’re going to close down early because of one thing,” and all the actors have studied and learned their parts, you don’t know if you have the right to snatch the play.
While the show was at the Mews, it was optioned for Broadway. This option, though, also came with requests for more rewrites. Childress rewrote Trouble in Mind for two years in continued attempts to satisfy the producers, who were still concerned about how white audiences would respond to the play. Childress recalls that after two years of rewrites, she “couldn’t recognize the play one way or the other.” Eventually, she made the difficult decision to stop rewriting, and the negotiations for the transfer broke down completely. It was not until Trouble in Mind was published that Childress chose to restore her original ending.
THE GREENWICH MEWS THEATRE
The theatre and its troupe operated out of the 200-seat theatre within Village Presbyterian Church from the 1940s (founded as the Greenwich Mews Playhouse). It was led by Stella Holt from 1952 to 1967, a tenacious manager who encouraged the production of works written by people of color. Under her leadership, The Greenwich Mews Theatre was one of only a few producing shows with integrated or all-Black casts. She went on to produce 38 plays over her 15 years that included the work of many leading Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Loften Mitchell, Alice Childress, and William Branch.
Stella Holt introduced Robert Earl Jones, James Earl Jones’ father into the theatre. As he had never learned to read, her sister, Estelle, taught him to read at age 22, which led him to read just enough to be offered parts in plays at her theater. His first play was “The Great White Hope.”
Dramaturgy Content by Kaylin Jones
Additional Content and Design by Dwight Clark