Broadway review by Adam Feldman
The first day of rehearsals for a 1950s Broadway play about lynching is about to begin, and a seasoned Black actress is showing a younger castmate the ropes. “Don’t get too cocky. They don’t like that,” Wiletta (LaChanze) advises John (Brandon Michael Hall) on the subject of how to deal with their white managers. “Laugh! Laugh at everything they say, makes ’em feel superior.” The beautiful Wiletta has a smile that lights up a room, and she knows how to turn it on whether she’s happy or not; John may chafe at her advice—”Sounds kinda Uncle Tommish,” he says—but she has been in the business long enough to know that a business is what it is: not theater, as he imagines, but show business. (“Colored folks ain’t in no theater.”) And in this system, even on the rare occasions that they get to play a role that isn’t a nanny or a maid, Black performers remain the help.
So begins Alice Childress’s trenchant Trouble in Mind, which debuted Off Broadway in 1955 and has now reached the Great White White for the first time in an exemplary production directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. Prospects for a Broadway transfer in the 1950s, a pre-curtain announcement informs us, fell through when Childress refused to soften the play’s ending. As a result, Trouble in Mind has largely fallen into obscurity, which makes this Roundabout Theatre Company revival feel like even more of a revelation. It’s as though an old curtain had been lifted from a mirror: To a startling degree, the play anticipates many of the conversations that have taken place in the past two years about the devaluation of Black artists in the theater world. (“We have to go further and do better,” someone concludes.) What the play demonstrates, with humor and insight, is not that Childress somehow foresaw today’s concerns, but that these…