Why groundbreaking Black playwright Alice Childress is having a resurgence

When Broadway returned to action in 2021, one of its first hit productions was Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress. The play-within-a-play goes backstage with a group of Black and white actors and a white male director as they rehearse a new production with an anti-lynching message, exposing the gender, racial, and social dynamics in theatre and the world in the process. In a season that featured many Black playwrights responding to 2020's Black Lives Matter and racial equality movements, the New York Times called Trouble in Mind "the play most of the moment."

But, although it struck chords in 2021, Trouble in Mind was actually 66 years late to Broadway. Alice Childress, a Black theatre artist, teacher and activist, wrote the play in 1955. She was meant to be the first Black female playwright produced on Broadway that year — but the production was cancelled when she refused to rework the play to ease white audiences.

The belated Broadway premiere of Trouble in Mind is part of a wider resurgence of work by Alice Childress, who died in 1994, on North American stages and bookshelves. In 2017, her novel Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestics Life was re-released with a foreword by Roxane Gay. The Shaw Festival produced the Canadian premiere of Trouble in Mind in 2022 (which the Globe and Mail called "disgracefully late in a perfectly pitched production"), while the Stratford Festival will produce Childress' interracial relationship play Wedding Band this summer. And out west, a co-production between the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and The Citadel Theatre is currently bringing Trouble in Mind to Winnipeg (it's currently running until March 11) and Edmonton (from March 25 to April 16).

"Black women have gone unnoticed for generations," says Cherissa Richards, director of the Winnipeg and Edmonton production of Trouble in Mind. "What's beautiful about Alice Childress is her writing is so relevant and so prescient. This play is dense, and it really embodies the genius of who Alice Childress was."

"This play is rife with moments of misogyny, moments of racism, white privilege, men taking up too much space in the room, the fight between generations. There are zillions of things in this play for us to be able to connect with as a modern audience."

"It's tough work, too," adds Alana Bridgewater, a singer and actor who plays Trouble in Mind's central figure Wiletta Mayer, a Black actor forced to choose between her Broadway debut or compromising for a white director. "I can see why people would read it the first time and go, 'Maybe it's not for us.'"

"You're also looking at the sensibilities and humour that existed at that time. We are very careful about what we laugh at and what we look at now."

Childress was born in 1916 in North Carolina but moved to Harlem, New York City at nine years old to live with her grandmother, who encouraged an early interest in writing and theatre. By 1935, she had dropped out of high school and given birth to a child with actor Alvin Childress. And in 1940, at age 24, she joined the American Negro Theatre, first as an actor and eventually taking on increasing roles as a producer, director, playwright, and organizer of an off-Broadway actors' union.

Her multi-hyphenated career resonates with the Black female artists performing her work today.

"A lot of parents, my parents, said the same thing: 'You got to work twice as hard to get half as far.' [Childress] did every single job you can imagine in the theatre because she had to, and she excelled in every one of them," says Richards. "I am a director, I am an actor, I am a playwright, I am a teacher, I am a mentor. Alana is an incredible singer, she's an actor, she writes and she tours in a band. Black women have been multidisciplinary humans our entire lives."

Childress' novels came later, most famously 1973's A Hero Ain't Nothin but a Sandwich, which was highly praised but controversial in its portrayal of a 13-year-old drug addict. A telltale sign of Childress' work — which is reflective of her later decision to forgo a Broadway debut over creative demands from white producers — is a stark and clear reflection of racist institutions and attitudes, no matter how hard they are to look at. A word that people often use to describe her work is "honest"; her characters are real, unique, funny, and angry.

"I think everything that Black theatre artists do, to a degree, is activism. Our being onstage, expressing ourselves and telling stories, especially our stories, is a manifestation of our ancestors' wildest dreams," says Sam White, director of this year's Stratford Festival production of Wedding Band. "I think the fact that Ms. Childress' work gives a deeply honest portrayal of the Black experience in the early parts of the 20th century, and in the deep South, was radical in 1965 when [Wedding Band] was written and continues to be so in 2023."

"Theatre has always been a vehicle for Black people to express our anger. Anger is healthy … The intersectionality of Black womanhood or being a Black femme person in theatre makes me angry every single day. If you're not angry, you're dead," she says.

Black artists have reason to be angry — taking Trouble in Mind as only one example, it's clear that they have been articulating and fighting for similar cries to be heard by societal powers, in theatre and elsewhere, and getting shut down. The reckoning of racial representation and equity on theatre stages in the U.S. and Canada, spurred on by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, is a continuation of ideas written down by Alice Childress and others. And as a result, many companies are celebrating Black artists in their current seasons (especially in February).  

This reclamation of Childress' work is a heartening and important bit of progress — as long as more follows. According to Richards and Bridgewater, celebrating one American writer is a small step in the work that Canadian institutions must do to properly address theatre's representation problem.

"My dream is one day that we do this, that we don't have to be relegated to Black History Month," says Richards.

"And to add to that, to also tell our experiences in our stories in our country," says Bridgewater. "Many of us are so familiar with African American history and that trajectory, but you know, my mother is Jamaican and my father's from the Bahamas, and there are stories there that still need to be told right across this country."

"But this is where we start," continues Richards. "We are in an upswing right now, where we are being invited to the table. And while that is exciting, as a Black artist I'm curious to see how long this lasts. Is this a fad?"

"I say to my students, 'Get your butts in that door quick, because we don't know how long that door's going to stay open.' So let's get in there and create this art as fiercely and fabulously as we can so that we are entrenched in the system, and they can't say no to us. The more art that we create, the more it becomes part of the mainstream."