Monique Touko interview: Wedding Band (The Financial Times)

When we meet them, Julia (Black) and Herman (white) are celebrating 10 years of loving one another. So close are they that he has to ask her what size socks he wears — he can’t remember — and has baked her a wedding cake. Yet they can never settle. The couple live in a society where interracial marriage is illegal and segregation dictates even the most intimate moments in life. “Most folks don’t have to account for why they love,” Julia cries in despair at one point.

 

Written in 1962, Alice Childress’s Wedding Band, a blazingly powerful drama about an interracial couple in South Carolina in 1918, was so incendiary, so candid about racism, marriage and sex, that it had to wait a decade for its Broadway debut and is only now appearing on the London stage for the first time. Yet it bursts off the page with all the confidence and warmth of a fully fledged classic.