ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, two African American women playwrights dramatized new trajectories. Alice Childress’ Off-Broadway debut, Trouble in Mind, honors civil rights heroines. Lorraine Hansberry rushed Broadway’s racially barricaded doors with her productions that blended Sean O’Casey’s lyricism with the vernacular pulse of Langston Hughes. Backed by the emotional genius of performers like Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier, stars of the American Negro Theatre, both playwrights set off a daring salvo of more insurgent, insistent freedoms.
