Trouble in Mind

 

Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress

At Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre on 42^nd Street

 

The history of the first Broadway production of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind is crucial to fully appreciating this fascinating play first performed off-Broadway in 1955. In fact, the producing organization, Roundabout Theatre Company, goes out of its way to inform the audience about the play’s history with program notes and an unusual pre-curtain-up announcement of that history.  In fact, as a book on the evolution of Black female playwrights notes, at the time of the first production, “Childress was the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades.”  The original off-Broadway production stimulated interest in producing the play on Broadway.  However, when the producers insisted that Childress tone down certain parts of the play, she refused the production on “the great white way.”

 

This is a play about the way Black actors were treated in the 1950s and the limitations of the type of roles that were written for people of color – maids, butlers, etc. A multi-racial cast is gathered to rehearse a play-within-the-play that ends with a southern young Black man falsely accused of a crime and the eventual lynching of that innocent youth.  It’s a bit difficult to completely understand the full script for this would-be play, but it’s clear the enthusiastic White director, played by Michael Zegen, sees the play in-rehearsal as an opportunity for a Black actress to play a lead role. LaChanze gives a startling perfect performance as the actor, Wiletta Mayer, who struggles with portraying a southern mother in a racist society -- a break from the stereotypical roles she has always had to tolerate as a working actor in the 50s.  

 

This production is promoted by Roundabout as a “wry and moving look at racism, identity, and ego in the world of New York theatre.” The first act portrays the first day of rehearsals and, as I watched it, I kept seeing this production in light of the current revolution taking place with on- and off-Broadway with Black playwrights painting diverse and fully developed perspectives on the African American culture and challenges.  It’s easy to forget that this play is a portrait of the way Black actors were treated by directors, producers, and playwrights in the time before the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s (and, unfortunately, decades after that time).

 

It's not until the second act that LaChance’s Wiletta Mayer rebels at the way the mother she is playing treats the son’s impending arrest. The last thirty minutes become an riveting and inspiring portrait of an actress who refuses to be a part of a completely unreasonable depiction of how any mother would advise her son in the face of racist violence.  Her turbulent rejection of the script with the director, and what her uproar reveals about the other characters, Black and White, puts the first act into perspective. Ms. Childress, is demanding the audience see the injustices that people of color experience both as theatre professionals and as members of our society.

 

It's rare that I decide that the last part of play redeems apparent weakness in everything leading up to the climax.  But Ms. Childress’s portrayal of actors trapped in the racism of theatre was important to show in this play in 1950s and now.  So, in the first act, Wiletta coaches the young actor playing her son in the play-within-the-play how to respond to the director -- Always laugh at his jokes and tell him his notes to the actors are right on the mark. Much of the subservience of the Black actors to the director, and to the racist demands of their profession, elicits laughs from the 2021 audience.  The actors’ “acting as they are supposed to act” are humorously exaggerated by the current production’s director, Charles Randolph-Wright; and the laughs seem to come from both White and Black audience members. I do not know how these roles were played in 1955, but this production certainly makes the playwright’s intent is clear and moving.

 

I should mention that a lot of the humor in both acts comes from its satirical references to method acting.  The 1950s were the heyday of Lee Strasberg and those who subscribed to his theory that good acting occurred when the actor internalized the character’s emotional response inside of the actors themselves.  Whether an audience in the 50’s recognized these exaggerated impositions on the actors’ style, clearly director Randolph-Wright coaxed laughs from a contemporary audience that has lived with actors committing excessive reliance on Strasberg’s theory ever since they started going to the theatre.

 

While LeChanze’s extraordinary performance is the highlight of the production, the rest of the cast is equally well suited to their parts.  Several actors (Black and White) must play self-deprecating characters whose subservience or old-fashioned acting style produces laughs.  A good example is Chuck Cooper’s Sheldon Forrester.  Forrester is so stereotypical of a “please the master” actor that he is actually accused by another character of being a Jim Crow.  But Cooper has been a proud American actor for over 45 years. He knows how to play this character with his tongue planted deeply in his cheek, forgiving the contemporary audience’s laughter at his character’s “yes-um” personality. This production maintains a carefully crafted balance between the humor and the horror of Ms. Childress’s intent.

 

Michael Zegen overplays the heavy-handed and totally insensitive first-time Broadway director – a veteran of Hollywood where the misrepresentation of people of color is rampant in the 1950s.  We would “get it” if Zegen toned down his overbearing persona and we might even find his Lee Strasberg moments humorous rather than simply domineering. Simon Jones’ as the Irish theatre doorman who has spent his life in various backstage positions acts as the frame for the play – speaking sense at the beginning and the end. The rest of the cast all fit their roles without flaw.  But it is LaChanze that carries the weight of a character discovering her true self and fearlessly confronting the injustices of her life that makes this production a rewarding evening in the theatre.  

 

Yes, the play appears to be dated and you might wonder during the first act why this play is currently relevant. But that seems to be the point of this revival.  The audience is supposed to look at this 1950s work and decide what it means in the 2020s – and there is much to enjoy and think about in this production as it stimulates “trouble in the mind” in the midst of our Black playwright revolution on- and off-Broadway.

 

Rating: A-