SOURCE: "Black Women Playwrights: Exorcising Myths," Phylon, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 229-39.

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

Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange, three outstanding contemporary black women playwrights, are crucial links in the development of black women play-writing in America. These three playwrights, whose perspectives and portraits are decidedly different from those of black males and white playwrights, have created images of blacks which dispel the myths of "the contented slave," "the tragic mulatto," "the comic Negro," "the exotic primitive," and "the spiritual singing, toe-tapping, faithful servant."

Childress, Hansberry, and Shange have created credible images of blacks, such as "the black militant," "the black peacemaker," "the black assimilationist," "the optimistic black capitalist," "the struggling black artist," and "the contemporary black matriarch." However, three images which appear most frequently in...