In the following interview, which took place in 1993, Childress discusses her attraction to and experience in the theater, as well as the feminist and racial issues explored in her work.

Harris is an educator. In the following essay, she discusses Mildred, Childress's narrator in Like One of the Family, and her position in oral and written African-American literature.

In the following essay, Wiley examines feminist and racial perspectives on Childress's Wedding Band.

In the following essay, Schroeder surveys the reasons for the critical neglect of Childress's work—especially on the part of feminist critics—and urges a reassessment of her oeuvre.

In the following essay, Wiley offers a feminist reading on the relationships among the female characters in Wedding Band.

In the following essay, Turner compares the history and nature of Langston Hughes's Simply Heavenly and Childress's Just a Little Simple in order to gain insight into the “complex nature of Black comedic representation.”

In the following essay, Curb explores Childress's portrayal of women in her dramas, particularly Wedding Band.

In the following review, Govan explores the role of the Black Aesthetic in Childress's novel Rainbow Jordan.

In the following essay, Billingslea-Brown considers the impact of anti-miscegenation laws on the lives of the characters in Childress's Wedding Band.

In the following essay, Dresner identifies rebellion as the link between the humor of the white suburban housewife and the African-American domestic worker.

[In the following excerpt, Childress discusses her works and writing process.]

In the following essay, Brown-Guillory discusses the stages of Tommy's development in Wine in the Wilderness.

In the following essay, Brown-Guillory discusses the depiction of black characters in the plays of Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange.

[An American educator and playwright, Brown-Guillory is the author of several works on contemporary drama. In the following excerpt, she offers an overview of Childress's principal plays, acknowledging her contributions to African-American drama.]

In the following essay, Hill compares the strengths and weaknesses of Childress's book A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich with those of the film version of the novel.

[In the following essay, Killens discusses various aspects of Childress's career, lauding her numerous accomplishments.]

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted May 1, 1987, Childress discusses her background and motivation as an author.

[In the following excerpt, Miller discusses Childress's depiction of black women in her best-known plays.]

Each chapter [in A Hero Ain't Nothin but a Sandwich] is essentially a monologue delivered by each of the different participants in the story. This allows for utmost flexibility in portraying the conflicting interest of the several characters. It is difficult, though not impossible, to show a situation in all its complexity and yet convince a reader that it is a child's perception. Alice Childress avoids this predicament with a most felicitous result. No doubt the fact that she is a playwright ...

In the following review, Wilson praises Childress's rich characterization and dialogue in A Short Walk.

[In the following, Rule provides a brief overview of Childress's career.]

Cora James's short walk through life [portrayed in "A Short Walk"] carries her from birth in 1900 through marriage to a dull man of property, flight to the then-forming Northern ghetto, love with a childhood sweetheart involved in Marcus Garvey's black-nationalism movement, middle age as proprietor of a traveling minstrel show and dealer in an illegal gambling house, and finally, death of a heart attack on the streets of New York…. There are fine set pieces here on the off...

["Wedding Band"] is a romantic play, and does not entirely escape the charge of sentimentality. The writing is rather old-fashioned in its attempt at Ibsenite realism, and neither the situation nor the characters really change from the beginning of the play to the end. But perhaps that was par for the course in South Carolina in 1918, and the play has a cosy efficiency that always holds the attention. It is a sweet old love story about hard, dusty times in a hard, dusty place.

Alice Childress has been, from the beginning, a crusader and a writer who resists compromise. She tries to write about Negro problems as honestly as she can, and she refuses production of her plays if the producer wants to change them in a way which distorts her intentions. (p. 190) The title [of] Trouble in Mind comes from a blues song of the same name. Alice Childress chose to tell about trouble in a milieu that she knows well—the theatre. The three acts of Trouble in Mind take place during rehears...

Bill Jameson [in Wine in the Wilderness] is the product of the old black bourgeois values. Sonny-Man and Cynthia are also victims of this old social order. They are educated; They consciously and unconsciously label themselves "better" than Tommy and Oldtimer. They are empty, artificial people, preaching blackness, brotherhood, and love simply because it is in vogue. Innately they are cold, cruel, and self-centered individuals. They are reflections of the old slave masters, imitators of white ...

Trouble in Mind is a play about black actors rehearsing a pretentious, liberal, anti-lynching play written by whites, produced by whites, and directed by whites—it is a comedy and its humor is black. Writing in 1955 (three years before Genet's The Blacks), Alice Childress used the concentric circles of the play-within-the-play to examine the multiple roles blacks enact in order to survive. Twenty-three years later we can look at the play and see its double cutting edge: It predicts not only th...

["Wedding Band" is a play about] a pair of lovers no longer young. She is black, he is white; she is a seamstress, he is a baker named Herman. The time is 1918, while the United States is still at war, and the place is a city in South Carolina…. Much of the wealth of "Wedding Band" is in the small scenes of byplay among the neighbors. For the most part, Miss Childress … [succeeds] in creating a whole style of life at that time and in that place…. All through ...

The history covered fictionally in A Short Walk is impressive and important: minstrel-show performers in the twenties are shown to have authentic lives behind the masks; the grim years of the Great Depression are drawn with the accuracy of experience; and, best of all, Childress involves her characters in the Marcus Garvey Movement—the first fictional treatment of that movement I have read. And it is utterly engrossing. One feels great respect for the writer's knowledge of the past and her fid...

There are too few books that convince us that reading is one of the supreme gifts of being human. Alice Childress, in her short, brilliant study of a 13-year-old black heroin user, "A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwhich," achieves this feat in a masterly way by telling a real story of the victims of today's worst urban plague, heroin addiction, and it reaffirms the belief that excellent writing is alive and thriving in some black corners of America. (pp. 36, 38) This surpri...

[Wedding Band] has an authenticity which, whatever its faults, makes it compelling…. The play's basic theme emerges from the portrayal not only of the bigoted opposition of Herman's family, with its vile Klan spirit, but just as saliently in the suspicion and fear with which the blacks confront the two lovers. Herman, on the verge of death during the influenza epidemic which raged at the time, proves his deep attachment to Julia by buying her a ticket to New York even as he lies helples...

[Childress's one-act play "String"] was suggested by the Guy de Maupassant story of the Norman peasant Hauchecorne, called "The Piece of String." The short story is concerned with the ironically narrow balance between guilt and innocence, and Maupassant, with that crisply inpersonal cynicism that is almost the crest of Romanticism, treats it with a brief wit and a long compassion. The play does not. The play in fairness is completely different. Only the memory remains. Mis...

The young adult novel seems to be here to stay, and with books like Alice Childress's A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich … one can see why. Young and Black Benjie Johnson is a junkie. Through a series of brillliant vignettes, we see Benjie through his own eyes and through the eyes of those around him as he nods his way through his thirteenth year.

Alice Childress' experience as playwright and actress is revealed in the brilliant characterization and dialogue in Hero, essentially the story of a 13-year-old black boy, Benjie Johnson, and his near-fatal brush with permanent heroin addiction. It is told honestly in the vital, but strong, street idiom of Harlem by several people close to Benjie, and by Benjie himself. While each monologue is part of the story, it also presents a different point of view and helps to develop a gallery of memorable ch...

Generally, plays written especially for young people are reviewed as useful rather than as literary works. [When the Rattlesnake Sounds], however, is a poignant celebration of courage, a beautifully crafted work drawn from the life of Harriet Tubman. Rather than attempting the usual chronological panoramic pageant, replete with trite dialogue and a cast of thousands, the author has wisely chosen to confine her drama to one act, focusing on the summer during which Harriet worked as a hotel laundress in Cape ...

Miss Childress writes with a sharp, satiric touch. Character seems to interest her more than plot. Her characterizations are piercing, her observations devastating. Apparently, she feels the American race problem is a family fight but not in the sense that a Dixiecrat would claim the problem in the South is the South's alone. Miss Childress seems to believe there is a direct relationship between black and white, that these are grandchildren and cousins who are being denied human decency. She, therefo...

In A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich, Alice Childress intimately portrays the oppression of the working class people living in Afro-American communities. With fine perception, she tells about thirteen year old Benjie Johnson, a victim of drug addiction, his family, friends and neighbors living in the Harlem ghetto. (pp. 72-3) Alice Childress has written a moving story that vividly describes life in the ghettos of Black America. It is a grim picture that holds little or no promise for the chi...

["Wedding Band" is an] honest and provocative look into black life in America just as World War I was giving way to the Twenties, though it has its vitamin deficiencies as drama…. Using a kind of South Carolina backyard chorus as counterpoint to a private tug-of-war between [a seamstress and her white lover of long standing] …, Miss Childress is at her best with the peripheral figures who lead prayer, read letters for one another, and spy upon the forbidden liaison with generous ...

The author of "Trouble in Mind" is Alice Childress, a writer with a quick eye for the foibles and crotches, the humor and pathos of backstage life in the type of Broadway production that utilizes a predominantly Negro cast. Miss Childress … has some witty and penetrating things to say about the dearth of roles for Negro actors in the contemporary theatre, the cut-throat competition for these parts and the fact that Negro actors often find themselves playing stereotyped roles in which th...

Black people have recognized the need for their own theater. To give voice to our esthetic meant that we had to be free of the white man's evaluation, his standards of quality. It goes without saying that this need for our own encompasses much more than just theater, but Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress begins with the hassle of the Black artist. She shows the difficulty of working in the man's theater and maintaining one's integrity and identity. She shows why the Black Arts Movement...

There is little movement in this one-act drama [When the Rattlesnake Sounds], but a wealth of poignant dialogue…. The title refers to [Harriet Tubman's] consoling Celia about her fear by saying, "Child, you lookin at a woman who's been plenty afraid. When the rattlesnake sounds a warnin … it's time to be scared." Despite the lack of action, the play is moving because of its subject and impressive because of the deftness with which Childress develops character...