Trouble in Mind
Roundabout Theatre Company, New York City ★★★★
It took 64 years, but Trouble in Mind is here “to take its rightful place in the Broadway canon,” said Greg Evans in Deadline.com. After an acclaimed offBroadway run in the 1950s, Alice Childress’ comedy-drama very nearly became the first play written by a Black woman to secure an opening on one of New York’s premier stages. But when Childress was asked to write a more upbeat ending, she refused. The unaltered work has now finally made its Broadway debut, and “to describe the play as prescient would be an understatement. ‘Uncanny’ rings truer.” The singeractress LaChanze stars as Wiletta Mayer, a Black Broadway actress of the 1950s who has been stuck playing only maids
and other stereotype-enforcing roles. Now, during rehearsals for an ostensibly forwardthinking drama in which she plays the mother of a civil rights activist, she is offering advice to the play’s young Black male star while she spars with the show’s “pompous, near sadistic” white male director.
This production of Trouble in Mind needed a steadier hand itself, said Helen Shaw in NYMag.com. Childress’ backstage comedy “could have been written yesterday,” and it’s “a masterpiece.” But director Charles Randolph-Wright flubs the pacing while weakening the satire. “Part of the problem is the theater itself: a huge, wide, intimacykilling room.” But Randolph-Wright has his actors deliver much of their dialogue to the audience, not one another, and he has his fictional director push for a stilted performance style that’s the antithesis of the Method acting that Childress was spoofing. Still, the show delivers deep pleasures. LaChanze has a “trumpet-of-Jericho” singing voice, and uses it. More quietly, Chuck Cooper takes a side role as a veteran Black actor, and makes that character “the soul of the production—a great deep well of knowledge, compromise, and sorrow.”