"'Wedding Band,' despite its comfortably yarny, old-fashioned construction, is a blazing, upsetting, necessary work for today. Its specific subject is the relationship between Julia, a Black woman, and Herman, a white man, who in the South Carolina of 1918 cannot marry — nor could they have until 1967, when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, overturned antimiscegenation laws on the books in 16 states. Looked at more broadly, “Wedding Band” is about the miscegenation of America itself, a marriage still far from happy more than 50 years later."
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"Tensions come to a head in a final confrontation between Julia and Herman that is as powerful and as real as anything you’ll see on stage this season. The same could be said for this production as a whole, which helps restore Childress’s enduring work to the attention it deserves."
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"'[Alice Childress] cuts deep with 'Wedding Band,' exposing anti-Blackness down at the American bone. Childress writes that love isn’t a cure for it, and neither is the judicial corrective that she could see coming. One of our finest theatrical diagnosticians, she traces racism’s creeping gangrene as the play goes forward, finding it everywhere, in white hearts and in Black minds too."
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"'Wedding Band' speaks even more directly to us now, and it would not surprise me if it makes its premiere on Broadway sometime soon as well. Until then, this exceptional production should be your introduction to a play whose author audiences can no longer afford to overlook."
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The Alice Childress revival continues apace… Subtitled a "a love/hate story in black and white," Wedding Band supplies plentiful doses of both emotions; it's a period drama that resonates powerfully today. As Childress knew, a society built on racism and lies is brittle and likely to break apart in often spectacular ways.
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"'Wedding Band' is certainly a love/hate story in literal black and white. And this brutal tete-a-tete is alone worth the price of admission. It’s almost as if the title, for its dealing with miscegenation then illegal in South Carolina, might have been more accurate were it 'Wedding Banned.' Indeed, Childress could have been punning. Moreover, she may have been having her way with language by calling her leading male figure Herman, which is, of course, a combination of 'her man'“
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Alice Childress’ Wedding Band, which is a difficult play to stage, is a major rediscovery. However, it straddles a thin line between realism and romance and its poetry needs to be handled very carefully. Unlike the tamer Trouble in Mind, Wedding Band has a very strong message and a good deal to say about racism in American in telling its sensitive interracial love story at a time when it was a love that dared not speak its name. While this production makes some problematic choices, the time has certainly arrived for this play to be returned to the American stage.
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"The particular resonance of this play lies in in its fractal structure, the way that the patterns of the individual relationships mirror the patterns in society at large; each character is a stand-in for a larger dynamic and each encounter is a small example of a larger story in this historical moment poised halfway between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement."
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