I sat down with Awoye over tea to discuss her affinity for Alice, directing this new production, and what it takes to make a classic.īRITTANI SAMUEL: When did you first run into Alice Childress and her work?ĪWOYE TIMPO: She came into my life late, actually. The assignment seems like a perfect fit for Awoye-a fulfillment of CLASSIX’s mission, yes, but also a marriage of her skills developed over years of directing new works from emerging artists and assisting theatre titans like Ruben Santiago-Hudson and George C. At the helm of the new staging is director Awoye Timpo, certified Alice Childress fan and the founding producer of CLASSIX, a collective dedicated to bringing a contemporary vision to classic Black plays. World War I, a flu pandemic, and familial disapproval of the relationship do not help. The couple at its center, Black seamstress Julia and white baker Herman, confront a litany of challenges when Julia moves into a micro-community of Black women in Charleston, S.C., who have… a lot to say about her. The play masquerades as a romantic love story, when in actuality it is a condemnation of anti-miscegenation laws, white fragility, war, and isolation. Leading Wedding Band is no small feat for any conductor. Where better then, for Alice Childress to do her thing? Shakespeare remains in tow, but now Adrienne Kennedy and María Irene Fornés run by his side. In recent years, that “classic” classification has rightfully expanded. Since its founding in 1979, TFANA, under the artistic direction of Jeffrey Horowitz, has remained devoted to the mission of producing classic and contemporary plays that resonate with them.
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After a few notable regional productions in recent years, it has finally been taken up, 50 years later, by another New York nonprofit with a similar affinity for the Bard, Theater for a New Audience (TFANA) in Brooklyn. Six laborious years and a Joseph Papp intervention later, the play premiered in 1972 at the Public Theater, known then interchangeably as the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1966, Wedding Band made its debut at the University of Michigan. But today, after a resurgence of critical engagement with Childress, a long overdue Broadway production of her backstage comedy Trouble in Mind, and a forthcoming New York revival of Wedding Band: A Love-Hate Story in Black and White, it has finally begun to feel like we’re proving the great wordsmith wrong.
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A frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, she published an opinion piece in a 1969 Sunday Times titled “But I Do My Thing.” In it she declared, “Time is up…I’ve a play to write that may never be seen by any audience anywhere, but I do my thing.”įor decades, this statement could only be read as a sobering one, as her novels A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich and Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life drew greater acclaim than her plays.
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Few would deny the American theatre’s under-appreciation of Alice Childress, including Alice herself.