Also in the 1940s, Childress helped found the
American Negro Theatre (ANT), to nurture the
dreams and hopes of aspiring black playwrights,
actors, and performers. (It later influenced such
actors as Sidney Poitier, OSSIE DAVIS, Ruby Dee,
and Frank Silvera, among others.) For almost a
decade, Childress studied and worked with ANT,
both on and off-Broadway, as an actress, play-
wright, personnel director, and coach. She ap-
peared in On Strivers Row (1940), Natural Man
(1941), and Anna Lucasta (1944), in which she
originated the role of Blanche, for which she was
nominated for a Tony award. In 1949, Childress
directed and starred in her one-act play Florence;
produced by ANT and set in a Jim Crow railway
station in a small southern town, the play treats the
issue of stereotyping.
Childress was not only very productive as an
author during the 1950s but also gained recog-
nition for several pioneering achievements. She
negotiated all-union off-Broadway contracts in
Harlem. She also produced two plays at Club
Baron Theatre in Harlem, Just a Little Simple
(1950), an adaptation of stories by LANGSTON
HUGHES, and Gold through the Trees (1952), these
were the first two plays by a black woman to be
produced professionally on the American stage.
She became the first black woman to win the Obie
Award for the best original off-Broadway play
during the 1955–56 season with the production
of her first full-length play-within-a-play, Trouble
in Mind (1955), whose title is taken from a BLUES
song of the same name. A Broadway production
of Trouble in Mind, scheduled for April 1957, was
never performed because Childress refused to
make changes in theme and interpretation to ap-
pease white producers and audiences. Her plays
were optioned for Broadway 11 times, and each
time Childress would not compromise.
In 1957 Childress married her second husband,
Nathan Woodard, a professional musician who
frequently composed music for her plays. For the
next three decades, she continued her interest in
drama and became one of America’s most pro-
lific dramatists. During this time, she wrote We d -
ding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White
(1966). Considered her finest full-length play, it
was first produced by the Mendelssohn Theatre
at the University of Michigan (1966) and was na-
tionally broadcast on ABC television; a 1972 New
York Shakespeare Festival production starred Ruby
Dee and James Broderick. Other plays include
The World on a Hill (1968); Young Martin Luther
King (1969); String (1969); Wine in the Wilderness
(1969), considered “a classic piece of contempo-
rary black theatre” (Bailey, 34); and Mojo: A Black
Love Story (1970). Childress also wrote plays for
children: When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975),
Let’s Hear It for the Queen (1976), Sea Island Song
(1977), Gullah (1984), and Moms (1987).
Childress received numerous awards for her in-
novative achievements and genuine dedication to
the theater. In addition to being a writer in-resi-
dence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough,
New Hampshire (1965), and a playwright-scholar
at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study
(1966 and 1968), she received a Rockefeller grant
(1967), a John Golden Fund for Playwrights grant
(1975), the Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding
Contribution to the Performing Arts from the
Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame (1977), and the
Virgin Islands Film Festival Award. Alice Chil-
dress Week was officially observed in Columbia
and Charleston, South Carolina, for the opening
of Sea Island Song (1977). She was also the re-
cipient of the Radcliffe/Harvard Graduate Society
medal (1984), the African Poets Theatre Award
(1985), the AUDELCO Award (1986), the Harlem
School of the Arts Humanitarian Award (1987),
and the Lifetime Career Achievement Award from
the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
(1993). Childress died of cancer August 14, 1994,
in Manhattan.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailey, Peter. “Stage: Contemporary Black Classic
Theatre.” Black Collegian 14 (January/February
1984): 34.
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Alice Childress, Lorraine
Hansberry, Ntozake Shange: Carving a Place for
Themselves on the American Stage.” In Their Place
on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America.
25–49, 52–64, 137–140. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood, 1988.102 Childress, Alice