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English Faculty Publications English Department

5-1-2013

Review: Childress, Alice. Selected Plays.

Julie M. Burrell Cleveland State University, [email protected]

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Part of the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! Publisher's Statement Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Theatre Journal, Volume 65, Issue 2, May 2013, pages 310-312.

Recommended Citation Burrell, Julie M., "Review: Childress, Alice. Selected Plays." (2013). English Faculty Publications. 10. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub/10

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 310 / Theatre Journal enactments were met with a different reception SELECTED PLAYS. By Alice Childress. Edited when directed at black audiences. For example, by Kathy A. Perkins. Evanston, IL: Northwest- hip-hop artist Lil’ Kim also exposed her breast at ern University Press, 2011; pp. 272. the MTV Music Video awards (1999), yet neither her action nor Diana Ross’s reaction (of explic- BLACK INTERNATIONALIST FEMINISM: itly touching her breast) induced the same public WOMEN WRITERS OF THE BLACK LEFT, outcry. By Fleetwood’s analysis, the difference in 1945–1995. By Cheryl Higashida. Urbana: these responses depended on the cultural realm University of Illinois Press, 2011; pp. 264. of circulation and the artist’s position within it; in all cases, however, a self-authored exposure of the Alice Childress is one of the most important black female body disrupted normative figurations and least known of twentieth-century dramatists. of female blackness. Recently, however, she has come to prominence Chapter 4 attends to the black male body, drawing both in scholarship and in the professional the- on the work of Roland Barthes and Diane Crane to atre, culminating in the well-reviewed 2011 Arena explore how fashion advertising strategically uses Stage production in Washington, D.C., of her 1955 hip-hop iconography to “frame the black male fig- play Trouble in Mind, as well as the publication of ure of hip-hop as [the] possessor of a new American her Selected Plays. As editor Kathy Perkins notes in dream” (152). Tracing the growth of the hip-hop her excellent introduction to the volume, Childress fashion industry, Fleetwood examines how adver- “has not received the recognition she deserves” tisers use representations of the black male body to (x). This lament is common among the small but promote a racialized image of masculinity that has dedicated cadre of scholars—Trudier Harris, Mary refashioned “Americana.” Helen Washington, and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory among them—who have made the promotion and The final chapter engages psychoanalytic film critical examination of Childress’s oeuvre a major theorist Kaja Silverman’s notion of the “visible component of their scholarship. Selected Plays will seam” to analyze how blackness in Western and begin to redress her absence from the theatrical non-Western contexts is produced in visual imagery canon by offering the first authoritative collection and technological narratives. Fleetwood discusses of her plays in print. the media art of Fatimah Tuggar, whose Fusion Cuisine (2000), for example, juxtaposes footage of As the editor of a number of indispensable vol- women in idealized household scenarios in the umes of plays by black women, Perkins has, with United States with Nigerian women engaging in this collection, brought together works by Childress similar domestic activities. Situating Tuggar’s work that were previously scattered among various an- within feminist media practices that question the thologies, as well as a play, Gold Through the Trees, gendering of domestic space, as well as “technologi- that has never before been published. Although the cal fantasies on which the United States’ concepts five plays included in the collection represent but a of citizenship, progress, and democracy are built” fraction of Childress’s incredible output, including (205), Fleetwood concludes that her unique strategy plays, novels, books for children and young adults, of visual assemblage—deploying the visible seam and journalism, Selected Plays is both a valuable and explicitly fusing images—exposes gaps in the introduction to and a representative sampling of dominant visual narrative and disrupts the interpel- Childress’s dramatic work. lation of spectators while exploring transnational The volume begins with Florence (1949), which subjectivities of blackness. centers on a confrontation between two women, one In Troubling Vision, Fleetwood effectively engages black and one white, in a Jim Crow train station. multiple theories from across disciplines to offer Despite its brevity as a one-act play, Florence nev- fresh readings of cultural texts that question black ertheless masterfully conveys the complex physical visibility. She gives us a new language with which and psychological barriers that prevent interracial to disrupt narratives of blackness as overdetermined understanding. One major stumbling block, the play difference, as well as a new way of seeing black reveals, is the stereotypical depiction of black wom- subjectivity and the black body in performance and en, which ranges from the tragic mulatta character visual culture. Scholars working in visual, feminist, to the presumption that all black women are maids. performance, and racial theory, as well as African Childress’s concern with stereotypical depictions of American studies, will appreciate her important black women is also the focus of Trouble in Mind, contributions to these fields in her book. in which the extraordinary African American actor JENNIFER-SCOTT MOBLEY Wiletta is cast in a stereotypical role in a play-within- Rollins College the-play. Through an innovative use of metatheatre, Childress exposes the dangers of African Americans BOOK REVIEWs / 311 performatively embodying white-scripted, damag- Higashida’s book enhances the growing body ing caricatures of black people. of interdisciplinary scholarship on the long civil rights movement, which seeks to widen the histori- Wedding Band (1966), which is probably Chil- cal time frame of the movement and recover the dress’s most renowned play, was controversial radicalism, rooted in the Left, driving much of this during its time for its portrayal of an interracial movement. Scholars like Mary Helen Washington, relationship, yet its political resonance was simul- Erik McDuffie, Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and taneously underestimated. The 1972 Public Theater Komozi Woodard have recently brought together the production was deemed “a sweet old love story” Left, feminism, and black nationalism. Higashida’s New York Times Wedding Band in the , but is in fact contribution is to place these concerns within a a searing allegory of the Black Power era and the transnational framework, or what she terms “nation- need for black people to form strategically separate alist internationalism.” Defined here as the “Black communities to preserve their bodies and minds in anticolonial Left who championed self-determina- a white supremacist society. tion for all oppressed nations, including African Of particular importance is Gold Through the Trees Americans” (19), nationalist internationalists sought (1952), a previously unpublished play that explores not a traditional civil rights movement platform of black revolution across the African diaspora. Perkins desegregation, but a more radical, and interracial, labels Gold a “dramatic historical revue” (xxi), but working-class revolution around the world. Chil- this designation does not quite fit its formal experi- dress was a critical member of the postwar black mentalism and Brechtian epic style. The narrator, Left who practiced radical feminist art and activism simply named Woman, threads together scenes from throughout the cold war period. the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, Black Internationalist Feminism serves as an apt to Harriet Tubman in the United States, and back companion to, and a useful lens onto, the works again to the 1950s South African resistance to Apart- collected in Selected Plays. Higashida examines heid. Woman is both an embodiment of the diaspora Childress’s novel A Short Walk (1979) and the Gold and a feminist icon. Perkins notes that draws unpublished play Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Tom-Tom on Shirley Graham’s opera (1932), but the Comedienne (1984), arguing that these two works play also employs the black Marxism of Langston “represent Black minstrelsy as a crucial site for Don’t You Want to Be Free Hughes’s agit-prop drama revising heteropatriarchal gender roles precisely (1937) and is a precursor to Lorraine Hansberry’s because it engaged with global affairs and foreign Les Blancs . Selected revolutionary African play (1970) policy” (86). Moms is based on the life of comedian Plays Wine in the Wilderness ends with , Childress’s Jackie “Moms” Mabley, while A Short Walk centers 1969 critique, and qualified support, of black na- on the mixed-race protagonist Cora James, who tionalism. While not usually considered part of the moves north to gain more freedom than the seg- Black Arts movement, Childress was nevertheless regated South or her marriage allows. Higashida an important black feminist voice during this time. reads moments where Childress scripts African Wine is a major statement on, and revision of, the Americans reclaiming minstrelsy in order to critique masculinist rhetoric of black nationalism. white, patriarchal supremacy, suggesting that these Although a study of black feminist literature critical reappropriations challenge the iterability of rather than theatre specifically, Cheryl Higashida’s racial and gender performativity. She argues, for Black Internationalist Feminism is vital for scholars of example, that “Moms’s outfit and the mammy role African American theatre. In addition to chapters it signified were denaturalized by Mabley’s [real- on Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou, it life] cross-dressing, which exposed the ambigui- devotes a chapter each to Childress and Hansberry. ties, contradictions, and crises of Black/American Higashida begins by defining “Black internationalist identity produced by U.S. racist imperialism” (98). feminism” as a post–World War II phenomenon that Childress’s concern with the manner in which black drew on leftist politics and “challenged heteronor- people, especially black women, are represented by mative and masculinist articulations of nationalism the dominant white culture is apparent throughout while maintaining the importance, even centrality, of Selected Plays, so Higashida’s readings of the min- national liberation movements for achieving Black strel scenes in Moms and A Short Walk are critical to women’s social, political, and economic rights” (2). an understanding of Childress’s work more gener- Such black feminism was international, Higashida ally. For instance, in Trouble in Mind, the protago- maintains, in the sense that these women advocated nist Wiletta refuses to play a certain scene in the a worldwide socialist revolution led by the working play-within-the-play that she deems untruthful to classes and the colonized, as well as a “fight against the black experience. Wiletta’s character is no more heteropatriarchy” (3). than a mammy role, scripted by a white author. As Wiletta becomes more militant throughout the play, 312 / Theatre Journal she begins to resist this role. Rather than perform- thus connects Hansberry to the black Left, but also ing a spiritual as the mournful dirge that the white usefully situates her lesbian identity and intellec- director requests, she sings it angrily, reappropriat- tual engagement with queer feminism within these ing the mammy role and directing it against whites revolutionary plays. who have distorted black lives for personal gain. A major strength of Higashida’s volume is the Higashida’s chapter on Hansberry is also worth careful historical framework of postwar black Left noting. The pairing of Childress and Hansberry feminism that it provides. Refreshing for those within her framework allows the reader a fuller studying writers of the cold war era are Higashida’s sense of the scope of radical playwriting during the penetrating close readings of the “vibrant literary cold war. Too often, for example, has Hansberry’s experimentalism resulting from Black women writ- A Raisin in the Sun been misread as a liberal paean ers’ Leftist commitments” (4). As with traditional to the American Dream, rather than the critique readings of A Raisin in the Sun, the cold war–era of class and gender that it is. Higashida also ex- theatre is too often seen as capitulating to McCar- amines Les Blancs and the lesser-known The Sign thyism (with perhaps the exception of The Crucible) in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), as well as two or as insufficiently progressive in challenging het- unpublished feminist plays with lesbian charac- eropatriarchal norms. Taken together, Selected Plays ters, arguing that these plays reveal “Hansberry’s and Black Internationalist Feminism demonstrate that internationalist, queer, and feminist vision” (72). In black women were, in fact, advancing a socialist, Hansberry’s work, “revolutionary Black nationalist internationalist vision during this time and paving consciousness opens onto plural sexualities and gen- the way for the second wave of black feminists. ders that defy the heteronormative and patriarchal JULIE M. BURRELL ideologies through which colonial and neocolonial University of Massachusetts Amherst social orders have been secured” (80). Higashida