SOURCE: "Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange: Carving a Place for Themselves on the American Stage," in Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 25-49.

[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.]

Alice Childress is the only black woman playwright in America whose plays have been written, produced, and published over a period of four decades. Like a giant in a straitjacket, Childress has remained faithful to the American theater even when it has looked upon her with blind eyes and turned to her with deaf ears. Having had plays produced in New York City, across the United States, and in Europe, Childress' legacy to the American theater is monumental. In her thirty-eight years of writing...