Wedding Band:A Love/Hate Story in Black and White – Stratford Festival
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Alice Childress, American novelist, playwright, and actress, born in 1916, is the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays in four decades. Once she achieved a measure of fame she became an activist involved in social causes, and formed an off-Broadway union for actors.
Her plays have remained relevant even though they are rarely performed. London’s National Theatre mounted a production of her 1955 play Trouble In Mind only last year. Now, the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival has now made this excellent production of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band available for streaming worldwide.
Directed by Sam White, the play is an emotional and revealing portrayal of interracial love, set in South Carolina in the shadow of the First World War and the 1918 flu epidemic.
It tells the story of Julia, a Black seamstress, and her white partner, Herman, a baker. Wedding Band has been produced only a few times since Childress wrote it in 1966, as interracial marriage remained contentious in the U.S. for so long. But this production is a revelation and is worth a Broadway transfer.
She wrote, “My writing attempts to interpret the ‘ordinary’ because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.”
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The post Ruth Leon recommends… Wedding Band – Stratford Festival appeared first on Slippedisc.
