The Undersung
Our critics on great artists who mightve been lost to the canon.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Its never quite worked out that way.
When she was living in Harlem, the portraitist Alice Neel painted Alice Childress.
The medallion around her neck looks cloudy and distorted; the flowers behind her are Impressionist smudges.
Childress is serene and queenly, gazing inward while looking out a window.
She talked about her historic position in 1972.
I just hate to see the first Negro, the first black, the first one, she said.
Its almost like its an honor rather than a disgrace.
We should be the 50th and the 1,000th by this point.
Everyone should be reviving Childresss work.
The dramas are powerful body blows full of beautifully observed human detail, hard swings in several genres.
In a career of mostly realistic plays, she also wrote epic pageantry like the history-makingGold Through the Trees.
ButGold Through the Treesslides from realism into poetry and back in a way that feels very modern.
The latter is wry, bracing, romantic and then bitter as gall.
Herman adores Julia, and he means well.
But lessons he learned as a child come out, and she finally rouses to fury.
Out!, Julia shouts.
Name and protection … he cant gimme either one.
But it has none ofSlave Plays insouciance; instead, it is completely earnest … and heartbroken.
(Producers showed interest when she wrote it, but only if she changed the ending.)
Ive always wanted to do somethin real grand, she says.
To stand forth at my best.
Why didnt Childress stay a theatrical household name?
