Born: 12 October 1916, United States
Died: 14 August 1994
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Arguably best known as an award-winning playwright, Alice Childress was also a novelist, actor and activist who worked for social causes and founded an off-Broadway union for actors. After her parents separated in her childhood, Childress lived with her grandmother, who encouraged her reading and writing. But after her grandmother died, Childress was forced to drop out of high school and began taking odd jobs to support herself. In 1939, she began studying drama with the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and went on to perform with the company for 11 years, including on Broadway with ANT’s hit Anna Lucasta. The show became the longest-running all-African-American play in Broadway history.
Her first play, the one-act Florence, opened in 1949 with Childress starring and directing. It featured themes that would be emblematic of her work, such as the empowerment of African-American women, working class life and interracial politics. This was followed with successes like Just a Little Simple (1950), adapted from a Langston Hughes novel, and Gold Through the Trees (1952). Her first full-length dramatic play, Trouble in Mind, opened in 1955, ran for 91 performances and addressed racism in the theater industry with a play-within-a-play structure. Plans to transfer the show to Broadway were terminated when Childress refused to change the ending. More than 60 years later, a revival of the show ran on Broadway in 2021 and 2022, and was nominated for four Tony Awards. Although she completed Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White in 1962, its content (about an interracial relationship) and realism proved too controversial for any theater in New York to agree to stage it. It debuted at the University of Michigan in 1966, but wouldn’t be staged in New York until 1972. Although it was later filmed and shown on television, many stations refused to air it. Childress also wrote musicals with her husband, composer Nathan Woodard, including Young Martin Luther King (1968) and Sea Island Song (1977). She also collaborated with Lorraine Hansberry, co-writing a pageant for the Negro History Festival in the 1950s. Childress is credited with introducing Hansberry to New York’s African-American theater community, and the pageant is Hansberry’s earliest surviving theatrical work.
Outside the theater, Childress published dozens of columns in the Freedom monthly newspaper, and authored young adult novels including Like One of the Family (1956) and A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which she adapted into a film of the same title released in 1977.