Broadway Play Review—“Trouble in Mind” with LaChanze

Trouble in Mind

Written by Alice Childress

Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright

Performances through January 9, 2022

American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street, NYC

roundabouttheatre.org

LaChanze, Chuck Cooper and Michael Zegen in Trouble in Mind

Alice Childress’ angry theatrical satire, Trouble in Mind—just now receiving its belated Broadway debut 66 years after its off-Broadway premiere—was an immediate critical success and was supposed to transfer uptown. But producers, skittish about its pointed swipes at racial stereotyping backstage and onstage, told Childress to tamp things down. To her credit, Childress refused to make any changes to dull the play’s edge, although this meant that, despite occasional revivals—like the Negro Ensemble Company’s in 1998—her magnum opus wouldn’t see Broadway until now, 27 years after her death.

Childress began as an actress, but without many good, meaty roles for Black performers she started writing plays (and novels) herself, and Trouble in Mind has several such parts, especially the lead, Wiletta, who’s starring in a new play—written by a white man—about a lynch mob in North Carolina that intends to explain prejudice to its mainly white audience in a comforting way. 

A half-dozen actors and the director gather backstage for run-throughs of the play, trying out different scenes while discussing and arguing about how to stage situations and dialogue that, however well-meaning, doesn’t reflect the lived experiences of the Black performers (two men—a young newcomer, John, and a grizzled veteran, Sheldon—and two women—Wiletta and Millie, who’s of similar age). 

The white performers, young newcomer Judy and grizzled veteran Bill, and the white director, Al, are sympathetic but clumsy in their pronouncements. Things come to a head time and again, finally in Wiletta’s frustration over a scene where her character acts in a way she feels is completely foreign to her own reality as a Black American in the mid-1950s boils over and she tells Al that she cannot perform it as written.

Although quite schematic—humorous small talk gives way to rehearsals that keep halting over mushy liberal sentiments that the Black actors balk at and the whites gloss over—Trouble in Mind remains a potent and caustic play, with a wonderfully full-bodied character at its center: Wiletta is a wounded, vulnerable but proudly forthright woman who cannot bend her knee to supposed superiors like white actors, directors, producers and playwrights.

Childress smartly keeps the writer and producers offstage, instead finding the focus on the standoffs between Wiletta and Al, a well-meaning but condescending white liberal who believes he’s fighting the good fight. He is, to a point, but his white privilege enrages Wiletta even more. 

Director Charles Randolph-Wright smartly knits his nonet into a cohesive ensemble, never tipping Childress’ play into becoming a lopsided two-character piece. There’s a nice blend of both accomplished and new blood in the cast, from Chuck Cooper’s humorously self-effacing Sheldon and Danielle Campbell’s perky but mercurial Judy.

Michael Zegen perfectly plays Al, a tricky role since he must balance the condescension in his resentful silences with his bleeding artist’s heart. And Wiletta is beautifully embodied by the great LaChanze, whose gloriously glamorous turn stops short of overkill: her theatrical flourishes, whether bantering, emoting or singing—gorgeously, of course—make her the explosive beating heart of Childress’ uncomfortable but entertaining expose that’s as relevant today as when it was written.