Selected Plays

As the first African American woman to have a play professionally produced in New York City and the first woman to win an Obie for Best Play, Alice Childress occupies an important but surprisingly under-recognised place in American drama. Spanning the 1940s to the 1960s, the plays collected here are the ones Childress herself believed were her best, and offer a realistic portrait of the racial inequalities and social injustices that characterised these decades.