‘Trouble in Mind’ makes its Broadway debut, finally
Alice Childress’ searing play “Trouble in Mind” has finally made it to Broadway and the only frustrating thing about the show is that it has taken this long.
The two-act play takes place — appropriately enough — on a Broadway stage and is an uncomfortable exploration of the racial divide in the 1950s. So it works perfectly in the 2020s.
Childress wrote a satire of the white theater scene at the time, poking holes in liberal banalities and the white commitment to Black equality. It will still take your breath away, making it a mandatory stop in the fall season.
The strong Roundabout Theatre Company’s production that opened Thursday stars LaChanze and Chuck Cooper still standing on fissures that were raw in the 1950s, from how agreeable to white authority Blacks must pretend to behave in order to work to the plea of white actors uncomfortable with too much Black boldness.
“Trouble in Mind” opened to acclaim off-Broadway in 1955, and was going to move to Broadway in 1957. It would have been the first play on Broadway by a Black woman, but Childress refused a request by producers to make it more palatable for white Broadway-goers. (Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” would later break the Black female playwright barrier in 1959.)
The show in 2021 at the American Airlines Theatre is directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, but the fictional director onstage is the deliciously named Al Manners (Michael Zegen). He starts out as edgy and inclusive — demanding something he calls “the firm texture of truth” — but soon proves to be straight-up dictatorial and ultimately racist.
Childress uses the play-within-the-play “Chaos in Belleville” — a truly bad work with stereotypical Black characters meant to exorcise liberal white guilt about a Southern lynching — to make her spikiest points. The term Uncle Tom is thrown about with regularity.
Full credit to Roundabout for seeing that a play written at the time of Emmett Till’s murder needed to be seen by a crowd who lived through the murder of George Floyd. Childress died in 1994 without a Broadway show. It’s our turn to show her she was right not to water it down; it’s our turn to make it into a hit.