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AliceChildress was a playwright,actress, and novelist. She was the first Black woman to have a playprofessionally produced in New York City. Childress's works include the plays WeddingBand and Wine in the Wilderness, and the young-adult novel A HeroAin't Nothing but a Sandwich.
An original play, full of vitality... Miss Childress has some witty and penetrating things to say about the dearth of roles for Negro actors in the contemporary theater, the cut-throat competition for these parts and the fact that Negro actors often find themselves playing stereotyped roles in which they cannot bring themselves to believe. --New York Times, 1955 Sixty-six years late and still on time, the play most of the moment is only now getting the mainstream attention that it deserves. Alice Childress's 1955 Trouble in Mind, a play about power and race in the theater, is a satire and tragedy that deserves to be a classic. --New York Times, 2021 In Trouble in Mind, Childress fearlessly unmasks the theater's deeply rooted racism. Something that the playwright struggled with in the '50s still chimes loudly in the present day. In the aftermath of the country's racial reckoning and amid the ongoing call for Black lives to matter, a predominantly white-run American theater industry has finally held a mirror up to itself. What the Great White Way is only fully recognizing now, Childress long ago detailed in Trouble in Mind. --Variety
