Selected Plays by Alice Childress, and: Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 by Cheryl Higashida (review)

Alice Childress is one of the most important and least known of twentieth-century dramatists. Recently, however, she has come to prominence both in scholarship and in the professional theatre, culminating in the well-reviewed 2011 Arena Stage production in Washington, D.C., of her 1955 play Trouble in Mind, as well as the publication of her Selected Plays. As editor Kathy Perkins notes in her excellent introduction to the volume, Childress "has not received the recognition she deserves" (x). This lament is common among the small but dedicated cadre of scholars—Trudier Harris, Mary Helen Washington, and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory among them—who have made the promotion and critical examination of Childress's oeuvre a major component of their scholarship. Selected Plays will begin to redress her absence from the theatrical canon by offering the first authoritative collection of her plays in print.

As the editor of a number of indispensable volumes of plays by black women, Perkins has, with this collection, brought together works by Childress that were previously scattered among various anthologies, as well as a play, Gold Through the Trees, that has never before been published. Although the five plays included in the collection represent but a fraction of Childress's incredible output, including plays, novels, books for children and young adults, and journalism, Selected Plays is both a valuable introduction to and a representative sampling of Childress's dramatic work.

The volume begins with Florence (1949), which centers on a confrontation between two women, one black and one white, in a Jim Crow train station. Despite its brevity as a one-act play, Florence nevertheless masterfully conveys the complex physical and psychological barriers that prevent interracial understanding. One major stumbling block, the play reveals, is the stereotypical depiction of black women, which ranges from the tragic mulatta character to the presumption that all black women are maids. Childress's concern with stereotypical depictions of black women is also the focus of Trouble in Mind, in which the extraordinary African American actor Wiletta is cast in a stereotypical role in a play-within-the-play. Through an innovative use of metatheatre, Childress exposes the dangers of African Americans performatively embodying white-scripted, damaging caricatures of black people.

Wedding Band (1966), which is probably Childress's most renowned play, was controversial during its time for its portrayal of an interracial relationship, yet its political resonance was simultaneously underestimated. The 1972 Public Theater production was deemed "a sweet old love story" in the New York Times, but Wedding Band is in fact a searing allegory of the Black Power era and the need for black people to form strategically separate communities to preserve their bodies and minds in a white supremacist society.

Of particular importance is Gold Through the Trees (1952), a previously unpublished play that explores black revolution across the African diaspora. Perkins labels Gold a "dramatic historical revue" (xxi), but this designation does not quite fit its formal experimentalism and Brechtian epic style. The narrator, simply named Woman, threads together scenes from the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, to Harriet Tubman in the United States, and back again to the 1950s South African resistance to Apartheid. Woman is both an embodiment of the diaspora and a feminist icon. Perkins notes that Gold draws on Shirley Graham's opera Tom-Tom (1932), but the play also employs the black Marxism of Langston Hughes's agit-prop drama Don't You Want to Be Free (1937) and is a precursor to Lorraine Hansberry's revolutionary African play Les Blancs (1970). Selected Plays ends with Wine in the Wilderness, Childress's 1969 critique, and qualified support, of black nationalism. While not usually considered part of the Black Arts movement, Childress was nevertheless an important black feminist voice during...