Since 2017, Classix theatre collective has worked to explode the classic theatre canon by exploring Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers. Current members include Brittany Bradford, A. J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider, Arminda Thomas, and Awoye Timpo.
Beginning with a staged reading series in collaboration with the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, their work has developed around four main pillars: readings and productions, education, narrative, and publication. Classix works with both theatres and individual artists nationwide to support the inclusion of the Black classic canon within theatre seasons, new productions, and adaptations. In education, they endeavor to transform the curriculum in theatre studies and beyond to better engage works by Black writers from across the diaspora in teaching, scene study, and production. The narrative pillar involves conducting research and creating content, such as essays, podcasts, seminars, and on social media, related to the stories behind the works—playwright biographies, the history of theatre companies that have produced classic Black plays, and the context surrounding those productions. In publication, Classix aims to amplify and increase access to plays, oral history, and scholarship by publishing new editions of classic works, anthologies, interviews, and academic essays. A key contribution across all these areas can be found in their online Classix Catalog, which features a trove of information on plays, playwrights, and philosophies of artmaking by Black artists and curated links to additional resources.
One focus of Classix's work to date has been on pioneering playwright, novelist, and critic Alice Childress (1912–1994). Childress's play Wine in the Wilderness was included in their initial staged reading series, and the collective staged a full production of the play Wedding Band at Theatre for a New Audience in 2022.1 Childress and her work are included in the Classix Catalog and featured in a six-episode series for Act 2 of the (re) clamation podcast (available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and the Classix website).2 In 2023, Classix began a three-year residency at Duke University called The Alice Childress Project, which involves public talks, class engagement, and several other events related to the legacy of Alice Childress. Theatre Journal readers can find a recent article on Childress's play Trouble in Mind in our June 2025 issue (vol. 77, no. 2).
Classix members Brittany Bradford, Arminda Thomas, and Awoye Timpo joined Professor Douglas A. Jones (Duke University) in conversation over Zoom on April 15, 2025. Dominique Rider and A. J. Muhammad contributed to planning the interview and reviewing the transcript. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Douglas A. Jones: Could you tell us how Classix came together as a collective, and what are some of your motivations, interests, and goals?
Awoye Timpo: Classix started in 2017, but I think the origins predate that by a number of years. I'm a director in New York, and I had a yearning to connect with contemporary classics, but rather than European contemporary classics, I was really thinking about classics by Black writers. That led to a number of conversations with incredible artists, including Woodie King Jr., Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and George C. Wolfe, and then Classix started in 2017 as a reading series at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center in New York.3 We did readings of four plays over two days with over twenty actors: Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress, What the Wine-Sellers Buy by Ron Milner, The Forbidden City by Bill Gunn, and The Brothers by Kathleen Collins.4 From there, we started gathering as a group. We all came to each other in different ways, but with the collective hope and desire to see plays by Black writers, what we would consider classics, up on stage and in readings and in classrooms—wherever we could.
Brittany Bradford: Something that's really lovely about this collective is that all of us are coming from different perspectives, whether that's as a dramaturg or a director or an actor. I can also talk about the podcast series that we have, which is exploring different moments of Black theatre history. Act 1 was on Black minstrelsy, but specifically Black people in Black minstrelsy. Act 2 was on Alice Childress, and we're currently working on the third act, which is about writer-director Bill Gunn and writer-activist Kathleen Collins.5 We also have an educational component, part of which is a catalog, and we're working on bringing these plays to educational institutions so that students and faculty can have a wider array of what we consider a classic play as well as a better understanding of Black playwrights' role in the making of the American theatre system.
Arminda Thomas: One of the things that we're trying to address is access: how you find out about these plays and these playwrights and get access to their works. Some of them are out of print or you can find them in the library, but they're not that easy to locate. So we put together a catalog on the website, which now has almost fifty-three entries. It's free—it's really important to us that they're free for students to explore, for academic organizations, for small theatres, for groups who want to know—to be able to just go and dive in. That's a really big part of what we're doing, and we imagine the catalog will grow, but we're also really pleased with that number.
Douglas: The catalog on the website is laid out with images of playwrights. When I click on them, I find brief biographies, links to plays, information about important productions, and other fantastic resources. A lot of this is already readily available elsewhere online and in libraries, but we don't hear about it or read about it in academic or public venues, which gets us a little bit toward Classix's bigger project. There's this phrase "hiding in plain sight," and I think it describes a lot of the work that you're doing. I was wondering if you could talk about how you see the work of Classix as a kind of unearthing, how you show that things are out there but someone has to go looking for them, collate them, and bring them to the public. Could you talk about how the project emerged out of an understanding of Black theatre as something that is at once ubiquitous and hidden? We think we know a lot about Black theatre because we know ten or twelve Black playwrights quite well, know some Black actors, and know a Black director or two, but it's a far more robust cultural field. With this in mind, how did you settle on those four plays for your inaugural reading series as well as the kinds of texts and playwrights you've decided to focus on across your platforms?
Awoye: When we did the first reading series, there were a lot of plays that we considered, but we knew that we definitely wanted an Alice Childress play, and George C. Wolfe had introduced me to the Bill Gunn play and also the Kathleen Collins play, so we also knew that we wanted those two. Then we were looking for plays that kind of explored a range of styles, and came to the Ron Milner play especially through conversations with Woodie King Jr., who had been dear friends with him.
One thing I wanted to touch on quickly was something we realized after the reading, and it relates to how we developed Classix's four pillars of education, narrative, publication, and readings and productions. We started to say, if you take something like an Alice Childress play, what are the conditions around which people don't know her plays, around which people are not studying her plays or not being introduced to her plays? One, you're not learning about her in school. We all went to school for theatre, and the amount that people come across her plays in the education system is very limited. So there's an educational issue here. As Arminda noted earlier, there's also a publication issue. Some of the plays are out of print, and they're very hard to find. So how do we address that condition by creating new publications? And part of it is a production issue. Some people have seen ten different productions of Hamlet or Medea because they've had access to those plays and those productions, so as they grow as artists they're excited to reexplore that work. So one of the things we really want to do is to create a world in which you can have access to readings and to productions of these plays. Then the fourth pillar came about because we want people to be able to engage in the incredible stories, not just in the plays themselves, but also of the people, the [theatre] companies, the communities around those specific plays and those specific artists.
Brittany: What you said about hiding in plain sight, it makes me think of conversations we've had about the idea of reinventing the wheel. If you don't know that something exists, then you think it's incumbent on you to create something, and everybody feels like they're creating something from scratch, especially Black creators and Black theatremakers. When you see that it has been done before, that it has been done successfully, that people have been breaking the mold or taking shows across the nation, or whatever it is, you realize the shoulders you stand on, and you are part of that narrative. I think it helps to feel not only a sense of community, but also that you can grow from that level, not from some base level that is below. That's also why it's important to find these [plays and playwrights] and to be able to be in communication with them in different ways.
I remember part of the reason that Awoye and I got together was that I was working in the library while in drama school and stumbled upon Black Picture Show by Bill Gunn, and I did not know who he was. I was trying to look for scene work that might be more akin to my personality, my selfhood, than I was necessarily getting [in classes]. It made me think, whom else don't I know that I might have a kinship with? They are hiding in plain sight sometimes, and even when you find them, you don't always know the story of the playwrights and the community that was there at the time.
Douglas: Before we get to Childress, could you talk a little bit about your process? When you stumble upon a draft that hasn't been published, how do you approach it? You find drafts, you find snippets, you find notes—you can use Childress as an example—but what is your process of discovery in a library or in an archive, and then working on the thing you've discovered? How do you do that collaboratively?
Arminda: Often, we start with curiosity about a period or a writer. For instance, we were working on plays from the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project and found ourselves at George Mason [University] going through [the archives] trying to find scripts and discovering plays we hadn't heard about that had gotten maybe a mention or barely a mention [in formal historiography].6 Then you take it and say, "Oh wow, here's a new thing!" You've maybe heard of the playwright, but you've never heard of the script, or maybe you haven't heard of either. Then we do some internal reading. We'll sometimes sit—if we have a place that will let us—we'll just sit and take lines and read it ourselves, or we get actors to read it with us so that we can hear how it reverberates in the room. This begins an exploration.
Sometimes it's based on a script, but sometimes it's based on people. For Black performance in the era of minstrelsy, we realized we only knew one or two figures, but not really, so we tried to find out what could be known and what we could still access. Some things we're unearthing are actually all there—they've been researched before, and we're finding things that are already present for us to find. Often this is because history is hard for America, Black history seems to be very hard. There are periods of forgetting, when books suddenly go away or websites are erased, and things that you thought you had access to are gone.7 Some of this is just natural forgetting because theatre likes to be new and prizes the new over the classic, unless the classic is in public domain; but also, there are periods of forced or enforced or encouraged forgetting that happen around Black creation. One of the things we try to do is make the path clearer for people who come after, to make it easier to find the things that we're finding.
Brittany: It's so interesting, because sometimes it feels like the people who came before us knew that this was going to be the case. Our people are used to this, and that's part of the reason why we know to hold onto things or that memory or story has to be passed down, whether that's in a written form or verbal. And this does connect to the Alice Childress of it all, because there are so many drafts and letters between her and Ruby Dee,8 or other things, that felt like they were there to be found later. It's also a testament to needing to have records now. Doing Wedding Band really made me understand the importance of having records of everything, saving drafts, saving opening night things, saving whatever, so that somebody after me, if they so want to, could look these things up. Sometimes that is the only way our history can be archived—someone in the community doing that deep dive—because you can't always count on the outside sources that should do it to do it.
Douglas: I'm imagining you coming across all this material, what Laura Helton would call "scattered and fugitive things."9 For example, your dramaturgs may be working in the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture] and come across a script, then find other drafts and notes, then some letters between someone like Dee and Childress; another one of you finds an image in another archive, finds a song online—you have all these scattered and fugitive things.10 When you bring them to the table in order to get a script together for, say, a public reading or for a full production, how do you decide what goes in and out? Could you talk a little bit about your process of collation and curation, decision and excision?
Awoye: One of the things that's been fun, because we've been in conversation with each other over many years around specific writers, is that we're always finding new gems over time. For example, we've been talking about Childress and the play Trouble in Mind for so long. But more recently, we've been working on a Wole Soyinka play in Brooklyn,11 and one of our actors used to work at a theatre called the Tricycle Theatre in London.12 Now we know that Childress did some rewrites on Trouble in Mind for a production that was done in the 1990s … at the Tricycle Theatre! But we haven't been able to find that version of the play. Come to find out, this woman knows the person who directed that production. So she called him on the phone and asked, "Hey, do you have a copy of the script?" He didn't have one, but he knows that there's a copy in the British Library. So we're continuing to put the pieces together, and now our next thing is to get to the British Library archives and find this copy of the script. It's kind of like a little breadcrumb we've been following for a number of years that's still in process, just because we've been digging for so long.
Douglas: And if you found that [Tricycle Theatre] script, and you had that with the 1955 script, then if you were to mount your own production. … Are you always interested in the most recent edits or do you combine elements of the 1955 and the 1990 versions? How do you come to that decision?
Arminda: First of all, the 1955 version of Trouble in Mind is never done. It was basically a one act. The production that we do now is something that she worked on for many years. She did a series of changes for the original production and then for Broadway, but that didn't happen.13 She pulled it because the changes they were asking for became too much, became more than she could recognize. But she still made adaptations to the play. It is a different piece than it was in 1955. It talks about Little Rock, it talks about school integration and how that was affecting the people in the rehearsals and in the rooms.14 There's a shift away from communism and the Cold War as a spur to what's going on [in the play]. … It's still there, but it's overtaken somewhat by Montgomery, and other things that weren't in the 1955 production because they hadn't happened yet. And then also she has a whole thing where she's dealing with method and what it means to be a trained actor, which aren't in the original….
In 1971, Childress gave that piece to Loften Mitchell for one of the early collections of twentieth-century Black theatre in the United States.15 But there was a really important monologue that she forgot to include, and she later sent [a version that included it] to the editors of another anthology, Plays by American Women: 1930–1960.16 They published that in 1994, and she told them that was definitive. So I would say that maybe because she said it was definitive, then I would go with that one, but I would still want to know what [the Tricycle Theatre version] was. I might do a staged reading with the alternative, or a recorded reading, just to understand what it was and what it says about the way she continued to think about her works. I'm fascinated, specifically with Childress, with the ways she continued to think about her work and was interested in it growing.
Brittany: With Wedding Band, I feel like the drafts were paramount to our rehearsal process. I very specifically remember the day Arminda brought in a version of the scene between Julia and Herman that was from a different draft, and it unlocked so many things. And really, in my opinion, what you are trying to do as an actor when you are working on a classic play is trying to make this document a living document again. You are trying to get away from it being this yellowed, dusty historical thing, and you're trying to understand why we're even doing it now. If it doesn't have relevance to now, there's no point. Even if you're not somehow incorporating all the drafts in the performance, getting to see all of them merges the gap between the rehearsal room that was created that first time around and the rehearsal room you're in now. In a way, it feels like these are conversations that maybe they would have had in a rehearsal room, and that's why something changed—maybe an actor said something and it inspired her to add or change a line or incorporate a new idea, or what you're saying about the Little Rock addition, Arminda.
So the drafts are a way for us to bring the playwright into the room, and all those actors and everyone who was in the process, so that we're in conversation with them and we're collaborating together. Awoye does a wonderful job of this whenever she's directing. She always ends every rehearsal by saying, "This is…" and the playwright's name and the name of the play so that you understand we are all still creating this together and also to honor those people. I think having all those drafts makes it a living thing that's still in process. It was always still in process for Childress, it got passed down, it's in process for us now, and maybe whatever we have will also get passed down in some way, shape, or form.
Douglas: I could see why something like that is important because you also work with plays, including Childress's, that are less fully formed or more inchoate. I know you've been interested in her Sea Island Song/Gullah (1977)—I could see how in a piece like this one, but also in something that has a "definitive" version, drafts would be important. I am speaking to a kind of theatremaking process that is really dynamic, a model that seems to be in a tradition of Black artmaking that is different from more Eurocentric models from the 1970s and 1980s that the academy esteems so much.
In terms of Childress specifically, though, what were and are your interests in her writing? How were you introduced to her? What do you find so compelling about her stories and characters? There's a Childress renaissance right now. What do you think about that? And what do you think about helping to spur it and being at its center?
Arminda: I discovered Alice Childress while I was working as an archivist for Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.17 It was around the time they were writing their joint autobiography and Ruby Dee had listed Wedding Band as one of her most important roles. That was a play I had never heard of. I had done my undergrad in theatre and just finished an MFA in theatre and thought that I knew some things. But I had never heard of this play, and there were four production scripts for it in their basement. So I became very interested in who Childress was, and I found some letters while I was going through and organizing the [Davis and Dee] archives, and I became kind of fascinated with her then. Later I was working with Elizabeth Van Dyke on the Going to the River Festival, and she did a reading of Wedding Band.18 When I heard the play, I kind of lost my mind a little bit. I could not believe that something like that existed that I had never been taught, that I had never had any exposure to.
Then there came a period where, in a couple of years, people kept asking me to do readings of Childress or supply information on her. So right after listening to Wedding Band at Going to the River, I got to do a historical sketch for a director who was teaching her students Trouble in Mind. I read Trouble in Mind and was again just kind of like, how is this happening? How has this woman written all these things? And shortly thereafter, I got to dramaturg a reading of Wine in the Wilderness and had the same experience. … It just kept going.
Awoye: I think this connects to what you were saying about the way we tell stories and the way we gather information. Over the years prior to Classix, I had been talking to actors, directors, and people I was working with on other projects about plays they had seen, playwrights they had loved. I was thinking about what of our classics people would be interested in. So many people mentioned Alice Childress to me, and I hadn't really read her plays. I had seen Jade King Carroll's production of Trouble in Mind at Two River Theater, but I think so much of my learning of Childress came in this way that we pass on histories orally. It's from stories that people told me about this play or that play or another play that led me to actually read the plays and be inside the plays. Childress is one of those writers—you're so invigorated when you step into her world, but you also get really mad, because you're like, why is this not the first thing they teach you in your undergrad theatre history class?
So there's a part of our work on Childress that is adamant that this woman and these plays should be everywhere, all of the time, because they crack us open into part of our history and into possibilities of theatrical storytelling that we don't want other people to be robbed of. But it's also a chance to invite people into the mastery of this woman's storytelling. So a lot of the work we end up doing is constantly cracking open new portals and constantly looking for people who can help us see new parts of it and shine new light on different corners of the portal and the wonders of Alice Childress. It's been delightful, and I feel like we learn new things every single day. It's kind of amazing to be on a long-term, lifelong journey with this artist.
Brittany: Classix taught me! I really didn't know her before. It's been great, especially because of how varied she is. The thing that is the same [across her plays] is her deep investigation, but how she explores things is so complex and varied and vast. It's been so wonderful to see the differences between Wine and Trouble and Wedding Band and also know that they're all the same person. But it was all through Classix that I learned!
Douglas: Why do you think Alice Childress has been so slept on? For someone who has the history that she has, worked with the American Negro Theatre, slated to be the first Black woman playwright on Broadway, a major political writer influential from the 1950s through the 1970s, why do you think she is so little known now?
Brittany: I think the first reason is the thing that we know: that society and even theatre people like to say, when we've picked our "one" or "two," then that's it. People say, we've got our Lorraine Hansberry and we've got our August Wilson, and we're good. Maybe we've got Adrienne Kennedy, and now we're really good. So part of it is not having a vast array.
I also think that we have this idea of success, and what is good, that is based off of a Eurocentric, very vertical model of success. So if it's won a Tony or a Pulitzer or it's been on Broadway, then that is successful. When you have someone like Childress who didn't go to Broadway for a variety of reasons—because she's holding on to her own moral compass or wanted a stronger hold of her writing—then when people are looking at those lists of things to show and don't see her, then there's no further research. So a lot of it is also laziness, really.
Douglas: Laziness, I like that. Real work requires one to build from the ground up, almost ex nihilo. I would argue that with a writer like Childress, the more you look into her writings, the more complex they become. A lot of her plays read more straightforward than they are, and the laziness stems from not wanting to do the work to grapple with its complexity and build something anew. It's doubly hard—as you know—because her work is still rarely done and there are no real theatrical precedents to follow.
Arminda: I think there was also a period during the Black Arts Movement—she was very active during that time, but she was also an older writer—when it was heavily male and experimental in its way. I think she felt, Kathy Perkins speaks to this, that there wasn't a great deal of respect for the well-made play.19 If she hadn't been discovered and it wasn't surrealism or breaking barriers in form in certain ways, then I think people just didn't give it that kind of attention.
Awoye: The only thing I can think to add is, as Brittany is saying and as we are witnessing right now, there is just such a blatant erasure of Black history and Black stories. White theatrical institutions, especially, put Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson—who were extraordinary writers—up on a pedestal, and say that's enough, we're fulfilling our kind of quota of Blackness inside of theatres. But there are all these incredible Black theatremakers who have done tremendous work trying to uphold the Black canon: Voza Rivers from New Heritage Theatre, folks like Woodie King Jr. from New Federal, a dwindling number of Black companies over the years. …20 These would have been the places that upheld this history, but over the years, there has been a systematic decrease in funding for Black theatres and many have closed over time. Then it becomes this weird reliance on the white theatres to hold our stories, which is not necessarily a thing they have an interest in or care for. So for us, it's important to continue to find ways to hold these stories in our hands and find collaborators and partners who are really invested in making sure that twenty years from now, thirty years from now, the artists of the next generations have access to these plays and to these stories.
Brittany: That's also why it's so important that the way in which we talk about breaking the canon open is not in order to be accepted by that white gaze. It is to be an honorific to the people that were already doing that work. The truth of the matter is, with the hiding-in-plain-sightedness of it all—Alice Childress having three Critic's Picks in New York in a span of four years21—there's not an excuse, really, that you can use now to say that you didn't know. We have Google, we have libraries, we have sources, we have people, although some living sources are dwindling. … If people or the institutions that are raising this generation of theatremakers want to learn more, the work is there. There is a deep conversation to be had within themselves about whether they value bringing all those voices to the fore, and that is a little bit our business, but it's not our business. I think that's something that's been really important for Classix: Even if the established, normally Eurocentric viewpoint of theatre fails to recognize these artists, it's about the people who care, who have been doing the work, the people who are not with us anymore whom we're honoring—that's really why and who we do it for, and we hope the people who want to find it will find it.
Douglas: Could you talk a little bit about your production of Childress's Wedding Band in 2022? That was the first time in many decades it had been mounted professionally in New York. What was the story that you wanted to tell with that piece, and maybe some of the choices you made?
Awoye: It's been almost three years, but every time I think about it, it makes me smile and also want to cry a little. It was such an amazing experience—it's giving me chills just thinking about it! We got to live inside of this extraordinary play that every single day was doing its work on us. Her writing is so magnificent, and the characters—I always say that she's a collision artist, because every single moment was so alive, so sharp, so beautifully crafted. Our job and our task was really to let the piece sing and let it live. As Brittany was saying, when we take any piece, we're thinking about what it means to be a classic play, but we're also constantly thinking about these plays as new plays of right now. So we had conversations that were from our point of view, at that point in 2022, thinking of how this play was going to hit the audience. It was a delight and every single day I think it taught us something new, unlocked something new. And even though we didn't have Childress's physical presence in the room, I really felt like her energy, her words, her wisdom, her insight were constantly present with us and guiding as well.
Brittany: We would love to do it again, whenever anyone would like us to!
Arminda: We were scheduled to do Wedding Band in 2021, maybe? We did a staged reading of it in February 2020, and then everything just went away for a while with COVID-19, so we had a lot of time to think about Wedding Band, about Childress. We had more lead time than you often get, so we got to spend a lot of time in the archives, looking through. I got to find all these [script] drafts and to think about what might be useful to bring in—what in these scenes is different, what is happening, what are backstories that got cut for time. … We got to do so much exploring. Our set designer Jason Ardizzone-West and I took a trip to Charleston[, South Carolina,] and wandered around, and looked to try to see what's a backyard, what does that feel like, what are the spaces [in the play]? What does it feel like here? It was really one of the most immersive preps I've had for a piece, and it was really special.
Brittany: I will say there was something kind of magical for a lot of us: It was the first time coming back to a play in a couple of years [because of the COVID-19 pandemic], so there was this energy of, like, a newborn baby. Everything was on the fingertips, vibrating, and that felt like such a perfect play for all your neurons to be firing. That's what the play was really asking of us, and not just because of the subject matter of Spanish Flu and COVID-19, but because of the experience of being in a room after not having been in a room, and not wanting to take that for granted. I remember that very, very vividly, how honored we all felt to be not just doing theatre, but doing such an amazing important work by a playwright more people needed to know about.
Douglas: Thank you all so much for this conversation. You've done so much to bring important attention to Black theatre companies and directors and dramaturgs as well—and these are all still woefully understudied and undertheorized in theatre studies. It's a travesty there aren't scholarly studies, standalone monographs, on the Negro Ensemble Company and its legacies, for example, and it is a travesty that the field is giving out PhDs in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American and African American theatre studies, but Black companies, directors, and dramaturgs and literary managers are effectively nowhere in the research agenda. It speaks to larger critical, conceptual, and intellectual deficits in the field, and it begins to make me question some of the interests and motivations in the scholarly enterprise itself. So thank you again, Classix, for all the work you are doing in producing and making accessible so much of the work that might someday change that part of the field.
Footnotes
1. For critical responses to the Classix production of Wedding Band, see, for example, Michael Schulman, "The Rediscovery of a Lost Black Playwright," The New Yorker, May 2, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/09/the-rediscovery-of-a-lost-black-playwright; Jesse Green, "'Wedding Band,' a Searing Look at Miscegenation Nation," review of Wedding Band, by Alice Childress, New York Times, May 8, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/08/theater/review-wedding-band.html.
2. Dominique Rider, host, (re)clamation, podcast, "Act 2: Alice Childress," episodes 1–6, Classix, May 9, 2024, https://www.theclassix.org/act-2-alice-childress.
3. Woodie King Jr. (b. 1937) is a director, producer, and founding director of New Federal Theatre (https://www.newfederaltheatre.com), whose awards include the 2020 Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre. Ruben Santiago-Hudson (b. 1956) is a writer, director, and actor, whose recent work includes the Broadway production of Skeleton Crew by Dominique Morisseau and adapting August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom for Netflix. He has been nominated for six Tony Awards, winning Best Featured Actor in a Play for Seven Guitars in 1996 (https://arts.columbia.edu/directory/ruben-santiago-hudson). George C. Wolfe (b. 1954) is a playwright and director who served as artistic director of The Public Theater from 1993 to 2004 and has worked on numerous Broadway productions. He has received three Tony Awards as well as many other honors for stage and screen.
4. For more information on the initial Classix reading series, see Lia Chang, "Classix Reading Series Featuring Plays by Alice Childress, Kathleen Collins, Bill Gunn, and Rob Milner at Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, May 22–23," Backstage Pass with Lia Chang, May 19, 2017, https://backstagepasswithliachang.wordpress.com/2017/05/19/classix-reading-series-featuring-plays-by-alice-childress-kathleencollins-bill-gunn-and-ron-milner-at-martin-e-segal-theatre-center-may-22-23.
5. William Harrison "Bill" Gunn (1934–1989) was an actor, director, playwright, and novelist; he made his Broadway debut as an actor alongside James Dean in The Immoralist (1954) and later became a pioneer of Black film. Kathleen Collins (1942–1988) was a civil rights activist, playwright, filmmaker, and poet; representative plays include In the Midnight Hour (1980) and The Brothers (1982), and her film Losing Ground (1982) was one of the first US films directed by a Black woman (https://kathleencollins.org).
6. Thomas and fellow Classix member A. J. Muhammad work together on dramaturgical research related to the collective's projects. In addition to his work with Classix, Muhammad is a reference librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research branch of the New York Public Library.
7. On recent instances of book banning and website erasure, see, for example: Huo Jingnan and Quil Lawrence, "Here Are All The Ways People Are Disappearing from Government Websites," National Public Radio, March 19, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5317567/federal-websiteslgbtq-diversity-erased; John Ismay, "These Are the 381 Books Removed from the Naval Academy Library," New York Times, April 4, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/politics/naval-academy-dei-books-removed.html; "Banned and Challenged Books," American Library Association, https://www-ala-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/bbooks.
8. Ruby Dee (1922–2014) was a civil rights activist, film and theatre actor, and frequent collaborator of husband and fellow actor-activist Ossie Davis (see note 17). She started her career with the American Negro Theatre and originated the role of Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) on Broadway; over the course of her career, she won numerous awards including several Emmys.
9. See Laura E. Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024).
10. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division holds the papers of many prominent Black artists and activists featured in Classix's work and their online catalog, including Alice Childress, Kathleen Collins, Bill Gunn, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and others. See https://www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg/manuscripts-archives-and-rare-books-division.
11. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) is a Nigerian playwright, poet, and novelist. Awoye Timpo directed his rarely produced play The Swamp Dwellers (1958) for Theatre for a New Audience in April 2025, with dramaturgy by Arminda Thomas.
12. Tricycle Theatre began in 1980, when cofounders Shirley Barrie and Ken Chubb converted a 1929 meeting hall into a theatre and named it after their touring company, Wakefield Tricycle Company. It was renamed the Kiln Theatre in 2018 (https://kilntheatre.com).
13. Trouble in Mind, directed first by Clarice Taylor and then Childress herself, opened November 4, 1955 at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. It was slated for a Broadway premiere, which would have made Childress the first Black female playwright to have her work performed on Broadway, but the producers asked Childress to make so many changes that she ultimately refused, and they canceled the production. See "Alice Childress," Classix, https://www.theclassix.org/alice-childress-about.
14. Referring to the "Little Rock Nine," the first group of Black students to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School in 1957 following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.
15. Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind, in Black Theater: A 20th Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, ed. Lindsay Patterson (Dodd Mead, 1971), 135–74.
16. Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind, in Plays by American Women: 1930–1960, ed. Judith E. Barlow (Applause Books, 1994), 467–542.
17. Ossie Davis (1917–2005) was an activist, actor, playwright, and film director who was married to and often performed with Ruby Dee (see note 8). He made his Broadway debut in Jeb in 1946, won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Jamaica (1958), and directed numerous films.
18. Going to the River was founded in 1999 by Curt Dempster, Jamie Richards, and Elizabeth Van Dyke to celebrate the work of African American women writers and create a national forum for emerging Black women writers. It has hosted an annual festival of readings of new work (and/or work not yet produced in New York), featuring the work of playwrights such as France-Luce Benson, the late Marti Evans Charles, Cheryl L. Davis, Lydia R. Diamond, Nancy Giles, Cassandra Medley, T.Tara Turk-Haynes, Shay Youngblood, Breena Clarke, the late Glenda Dickerson, Micki Grant, Aishah Rahman, Regina Taylor, and many more. For more information, see "Artistic Thoughts," Director Elizabeth Van Dyke, https://www.elizabethvandyke.me/artistic-thoughts.
19. Discussion with Kathy Perkins can be heard here: Dominique Rider, host, (re)clamation, podcast, "Act 2: Alice Childress," episode 2, "A Conversation with Kathy Perkins," Classix, May 9, 2024, https://www.theclassix.org/act-2-alice-childress.
20. Voza Rivers (b. 1942) is an award-winning theatre and film producer; New Heritage Theatre (https://newheritagetheatre.org) was initially founded in 1964 as New Heritage Repertory Theatre and renamed New Heritage Theatre Group in 1983 under Rivers's leadership.
21. See Maya Phillips, "'Wine in the Wilderness' Review: Beauty in Blackness," review of Wine in the Wilderness, by Alice Childress, March 25, 2025, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/theater/wine-in-the-wilderness-review.html; Green, "Wedding Band"; Jesse Green, "'Trouble in Mind,' 66 Years Late and Still on Time," review of Trouble in Mind, by Alice Childress, New York Times, November 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/theater/trouble-in-mind-review.html.