Consider, Compare, and Contrast


April 25, 2022

Alice Childress

Childress devoted her life to fighting for justice and illuminating the lives of ordinary people -- the 'underdogs,' as she often called them. She presented an American voice not often heard on the stage: one resonating with the voices of women very much like herself -- reliant, vocal, no-nonsense, and often uncompromising. Childress was a spiritual and very compassionate individual who loved people, fighting against social injustices throughout her life. She was aware of the price she paid for her integrity -- particularly financially -- and wished that more of her plays had been professionally produced.  Often called a writer ahead of her time, Childress responded with, 'People aren't ahead of their time, they are choked during their time.'

  ... Kathy Perkins. Introduction, Selected Plays, Alice Childress (2011)

Lorraine Hansberry

...She had been tempered by the fire and emerged briefly to let her own light shine.  She knew that blackness was the basis of her existence, not the totality, and that if it becomes the whole, one can only be consumed by the fires of one's own rage and frustration. Lorraine Hansberry is the black artist who lived beyond anger, which is not to say that she wasn't angry.... Anger did not define her art but motivated and informed it.  The quality which pervades her plays is compassion, the kind of compassion which can slap a face as easily as it can kiss a cheek, which can curse as easily as it can tease.  She didn't make the mistake of hating white people.  She hated what people did to each other.

... Julius Lester. Introduction, Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry (1972)


excerptRoutledge Freedom Forward.pdf

The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2019),  Chapter 6.

As we try to  get our heads back into the late 1950s, let's take a l0ok at what else was on Broadway when A Raisin in the Sun opened.       

Broadway Season Summary   1958-1959  

You may want to take another look at the Civil Rights Timeline 1915-1965 - HERE

Materials to consider as we compare and contrast the work of Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry, especially Trouble in Mind and A Raisin in the Sun

Click HERE to read an essay written by Alice Childress (date unknown), published in Black American Literature and Humanism [2015]. She touches on criticism of theatre and the choice of characters to represent the Black community.

. . .

HERE are excerpts from a 2011 Ms. magazine article.  Trouble was about to open at Arena Stage, Washington D.C. While the piece repeats a bit of what we already know about Childress and the play, an interview with the play's director and major cast members adds to our discussion of the play's relevance.

. . .

Below is a wonderful article. Its author, Don Evans, based the piece on his friendship with Alice Childress, a relationship that began with an interview sometime around 1972. 

Conversations with Alice Childress.pdf
Raisin in the Sun Anniversary of an American Classic.pdf

This essay by Margaret B. Wilkerson celebrates and analyzes A Raisin in the Sun thirty years after it was written.  

Wilkerson has written extensively on Lorraine Hansberry. She is Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley (African American Studies and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) and former director, Media Arts and Culture, Ford Foundation.  

. . .

Amiri Baraka wrote about Raisin in his "A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun's Enduring Passion"  (1986). You can read excerpts HERE.





How does this 2013 "CBS Sunday Morning" interview with Sidney Poitier relate to the work of Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry?

Just how radical?

A few excerpts from The Other Blacklist, The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. Mary Helen Washington, 2014.

We are all going to suffer much more until we wake  up and defend the rights of Communists.

... Alice Childress, Conversations from Life, 1952

Alice Childress RED.docx

So dear friend, I must perhaps go to jail.  Please at the next red-baiting session you hear ... remember this "Communist."

... Lorraine Hansberry, "Letter to Edythe," 1951

HansberryLeft excerpts.docx

Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry  -  OTHER WORKS

They Speak Who Listens.docx

This article was written in 1974 by Barbara Molette, a playwright who taught in the Theater Department at Spelman College in Atlanta.

She writes on the plight of Black women playwrights and highlights two specific works: Alice Childress's Wedding Band (1966) and Lorraine Hansberry's The Drinking Gourd (1960).


Below find more on these two plays:

An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress's Wedding Band  by Rosemary Curb

and

The Drinking Gourd (An Introduction)  by Robert Nemiroff

           

Wedding Band Tragedy.pdf
The Drinking Gourd.pdf
Review of Seleced Plays Childress.pdf

  Read more about     later plays by Childress and Hansberry

JSTOR LorraineHansberry's LastDRamas.pdf

Works of Alice Childress

Plays:

·   Florence (1949)

·   Just a Little Simple (1950)

·   Gold Through the Trees (1952)

·    Trouble in Mind (1955)

·   Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966)

·   The Freedom Dream, later retitled Young Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)

·   String (1969)

·   Wine in the Wilderness (1969)

·   Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970)

·   When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975)

·   Let's Hear It for the Queen (1976)

·   Sea Island Song, later retitled Gullah (1977)

·   Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (1987)

 

Novels:

·   Like One of the Family 1956)

·   A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which became a  film of the same title  in 1978.

·   A Short Walk (1979)


These are major works and do not include the many articles, essays, and other writings of these two playwrights. 

Works of Lorraine Hansberry

Plays:

·   A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

·   A Raisin in the Sun, screenplay (1961)

·   "On Summer" (essay) (1960)

·   The Drinking Gourd (1960)

·   What Use Are Flowers? (written c. 1962)

·   The Arrival of Mr.Todog– a parody of Waiting for Godot

·   The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)

·   The Sign in Sidney Bluestein’s Window 1965)

·   To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)

·   Les Blancs:The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry. Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994)

·   Toussaint. This fragment from a work in progress, unfinished at the time of Hansberry's untimely death, deals with a Haitian plantation owner and his wife whose lives are soon to change drastically as a result of the revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture (From the Samuel French, Inc. catalog of plays.)


and, finally


Is there another Hansberry play in the future:   Marrow

"... a scholar’s research promises to bring renewed attention to the unpublished script and its centrality to Hansberry’s radical vision of violence in American history."



At left, Website accessed during April 25 conversation

Pages highlighted:

1950s America

1960s America

Lorraine Hansberry, Online Resources



Below, Audio documentary played