After seeing the 2021 Broadway production of Alice Childress’s 1955 “Trouble in Mind” by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the line that echoes throughout this production was the older actress Wiletta’s line to the younger actor John:
Wiletta: John, I told you every thing wrong ’cause I ddin’t know better, that’s the size of it. No fool like an old fool. You right, don’t make sense to be bown’ and scrapin’ and tommin’….No, don’t pay no attention to what I said.
John [completely MANNERS]: Wiletta, my dear, you’re my sweetheart. I love you madly and I think you’re wonderfully magnificent!
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This line echoes throughout the production. This line echoes throughout LaChanze’s unforgettable performance of Wiletta Mayer, the actress in the play who at the end comes to her conscience. Wiletta is an actress who dares to question the script; she speaks from a conscience that refuses to perform a stereotypical role.
The play Trouble in Mind is a play within a play.
The play’s setting is a rehearsal room of a Broadway stage production where the cast is rehearsing an historical drama Chaos in Bellville, that is supposed to depict the Jim Crow life in a dramatic way. However the play’s climax emerges when Wiletta poses serious questions to the play’s director about whether the mother she is performing should actually send her son Job out to a lynch mob for simply asserting the right to vote.
In Childress’s original, powerful, and uniquely American play, Wiletta is punished by the Broadway industry for speaking her mind about why the character she is assigned to play is stereotypical and, consequently, should be, in her mind, changed into a less stereotypical character. In Childress’s real life, life imitated art.
In this 2021 production, the way LaChanze performs Wiletta Mayer is unforgettable. Her most dramatic scenes, which include her confrontation with the play director Al Manners, performed powerfully by Michael Zegen, all seem empowered by her line to the younger actor John in the cast who plays the son of Wiletta’s character, Job.
Wiletta in the first act is confident about her ability to perform her role to the satisfaction of her director, Al Manners. She conveys this confidence to the younger actor, John, performed perfectly in this production by Brandon Micheal Hall.
However by the second act, when Wiletta spends more time with the script of Chaos in Bellville, she begins to question the motivations of the character she is cast to perform. To Al Manners, Wiletta questions why a mother would send her son out to a lynch mob just for asserting the right to vote.
Alice Childress wrote this play after writing for Paul Robeson’s Freedom periodical, which I wrote about in my 2012 Temple University dissertation. In this dissertation, I wrote that Trouble in Mind is based in part on the life of Maceo Snipes, who was mentioned in the Freedom periodical and in Robeson’s 1949 address to the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship where he said: “His murderers walked away saying, ‘We told you not to vote. But the widow of Maceo Snipes told her children: “When you grow up, you’ll
vote too.” From this play’s script, it is clear that the message of Snipes’s widow to her younger generation affected Childress and how she wrote Wiletta’s responsibility to the younger generation.
Like Snipes’s widow and Alice Childress herself, Wiletta does not want the younger generation kowtowing the industry or its lackeys by succumbing to the fear that the industry tries to induce.
When Wiletta confronts Al Manners about why her character should be written differently, he replies that the mainstream theater audience does not want to hear “the unvarnished truth.” The director Al Manners then leaves the rehearsal, ends the rehearsal promptly and has his stage manager tell the cast members that they will be called individually for tomorrow’s rehearsal.
Wiletta deduces that all the cast members except her will be called back to return for rehearsal. The beauty of this play is her decision to show up to the rehearsal, whether she is called back or not; it is her resolute posture and attitude after her honest and direct questions to the play’s director about the stereotypical nature of her character.
Life imitated art in the case of Childress’ own life but also in the case of the life of Trouble in Mind. After its original Greenwich Mews theater production, according to her scholars Kathy Perkins and Lavinia Jennings, Childress had similar problems of “interpretation” with her own white producer when he threatened to cancel the off-Broadway production if she did not end the play happily, dec since the commercial theater preferred such happy endings. Childress conceded and changed the ending. In the revision, Wiletta,
instead of resolving to return the next day, negotiates a “realistic” presentation with Al Manners. Later Childress was asked to move the play to Broadway with a series of rewrites. Her frustration with the constant request to accommodate the various white producers resulted in her refusing to continue rewriting after she said she “couldn’t recognize the play one way or the other” therefore ultimately resolving not to have it done.
Sixty six years after Childress decided not to change her script to her 1955 Broadway producers’ demands, Todd Haimes at the helm of Roundabout Theatre Company has produced this play on Broadway, directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. In a letter by Haimes that was printed in the production’s playbill, it reads: “I am proud that Roundabout is giving Trouble in Mind its long overdue spotlight, especially at this vital moment.”
In the age of #BlackLivesMatter, Childress’s message in 2021 is as vital as it was in 1957 when it references the efforts of the younger generation in the Little Rock Nine to better themselves. Childress’s voice through Wiletta is a warning to all members of the older generation not to encourage those of the younger generation to kowtow to the demands of industry.
Jessica Frances Dukes’s performance of Millie is unforgettable, namely her lines to John about the danger of getting involved with their castmate, Judy performed by Danielle Campbell.
Special thanks to Lavinia Jennings for writing an UNFORGETTABLE biography of Alice Childress published by Twayne; to lighting designer Kathy Perkins for her edited collection of Childress’s plays published by Northwestern University press, and for tickets to see this production. And special thanks to Gordon Barnes for joining me to see this production.