Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright

Abstract

In Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (1988), Elizabeth Brown-Guillory declared that Childress is the only black woman in America whose plays have been written, produced, and published over a period of four decades.1 Childress wrote seventeen plays. Six have a history of both production and publication.2 Four of these plays, appearing on stage between 1949 and 1969 when she was writing and working exclusively in and for the American theatre, have procured for her many coveted awards, and great visibility. But it is still the norm to walk into popular bookstores and not see any plays by Alice Childress on the shelves. And it is possible to finger through publishers' catalogues under author, title, or subject and not find a listing for Childress, or discover that the few single editions of her plays have long been and remain out of print. This should not be since over the last twenty years, Childress's plays have been important subject matter for critical evaluation of the history of dramatic in the United States. Through historical-critical analysis of modern American in general and of black in particular, as well as black feminist criticism, feminist theories of dramatic criticism, and a resurgent wave of curricular inclusion of drama as literature, critics have analyzed Childress's plays ultimately as literature to be performed. But they also maintain in their analyses the fabulist view of the playwright as a storyteller, as an interpreter of reality. In their works, Samuel Hay, C. W. E. Bigsby, Carlton and Barbara Molette, Mance Williams, Genevieve Fabre, Emory Lewis, and Loften Mitchell reevaluate the themes of racial injustice and the struggle for human rights at the center of the stories Childress's plays tell.3 They all conclude that critics need to reconsider her plays as serious contributions to the literary and theatrical histories of how functions in American culture and society.4 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Margaret B. Wilkerson, John 0. Killens, Trudier Harris, Rosemary Curb, and Jeanne-Marie A. Miller have written books and articles examining the generation of Childress's strong black female protagonists, and her subjectivity of black women's issues concerning legal, educational, social, political, and economic struggle in this country. These scholars link Childress's plays to a literary tradition of black women writers from the New Negro Renaissance to modern and contemporary movements.5 In the same vein, Gayle Austin, Helene Keyssar, and Janet Brown explore plot and theme as ideological structures of a feminist premise and method of presentation in drama. They include Childress's plays among those of women dramatists from the United States and Europe in studies that reveal a dialogue on the political poetics of women's drama.6