“Wedding Band,” a play by the late, great Alice Childress, is experiencing a breathtaking production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn on Ashland Place.
It is presented and produced by Theatre for a New Audience as part of its residency of CLASSIX—a collective created by Awoye Timpo with Brittany Bradford, A.J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider and Arminda Thomas—that concentrates on Black performance history and Black writers. Childress’ play is one of the most gripping pieces of theater you would want to experience. She writes about Charleston, South Carolina, a place where racism is alive and well in 1918.
The Black women and the young Black soldier try to tell Julia all that white people have done and continue to do to our people. They tell her that he is using her. Herman comes to Julia’s home and it’s soon realized that he has yellow fever. His mother and sister are sent for, because the police can’t be called. It is illegal for him to be in a Black woman’s bed. Julia is very distraught that she can’t send for a doctor.