Alice Childress’s Troubling Method: Theatrical “Truth” and the Cold War Politics of Rehearsing Racial Authenticity

This essay analyzes Alice Childress’s artistic and political investments in Stanislavskian approaches to acting such as the “Method” as means for expanding Black agency in US theatre during the Cold War. Childress’s play Trouble in Mind and her theatrical manifesto “For a Negro Theatre” offer insight into her critical attention to the processes of theatrical production and to the rehearsal room as a site of artistic labor. Attending to Childress’s work amid its recent renaissance invites a reassessment of the politics of Black theatrical authenticity in the long shadow of the Cold War and its enduring orders of racial liberalism.