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    LaChanze on Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind”

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    Since October, the actress has been performing the lead role of Wiletta Mayer in the Broadway debut of Childress’s 1955 play.“I started to scream but no sound come out … just a screamin’ but no sound …”Alice Childress wrote those words in her 1955 play “Trouble in Mind,” which the Roundabout Theater Company produced on Broadway this fall, in a limited run that will end on Sunday. The backstage comedy-drama, about the rehearsal process for an anti-lynching play, tackles racism in the theater industry, and that quote sums up what Black Americans have historically experienced — a consistent outcry to be heard by the dominant society that refuses to listen.In “Trouble in Mind,” I play Wiletta Mayer, a middle-aged actress who dreams of doing something “real grand … in the theater.” This is Wiletta’s first time as the lead in a play, not a musical. Surprisingly, this role in a play is a first for me as well, even though I have been performing in Broadway musicals for over 30 years. And it’s the perfect role, because of many of my career experiences: as an actress onstage, my length of time in this business, not having the opportunity to be considered a serious dramatic actress. I draw on all of them to step into Wiletta’s shoes.Now I go to the American Airlines Theater six times a week to portray a character I first came to know in college. I get to feel her life experiences as my own. I get to convey the things so many Black actors have expressed, but, as Wiletta says, “You don’t want to hear.”I first read “Trouble in Mind” — along with a wide range of works by Black American playwrights — as a student at Morgan State University in Maryland, one of our nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. Writers who used their plays as art and activism — Childress, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks and so many others — inspired me to become a performing artist. Studying their works ignited my ambition to delve as deep as a person can into the values that make an artist and activist. I wanted to feel their kind of power, their eloquence, and their courage. This courage, this fire that led Childress to produce such timeless words. In fact her play is being performed word-for-word in its original form.Childress was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1916, and died in Queens in 1994. She wrote and produced plays for four decades. She put up “Trouble” Off Broadway in 1955, four years before Lorraine Hansberry made history by debuting “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway, and was the first playwright I ever read to show authentic conversations between Black Americans, things that are said about whites when whites aren’t around. She exposed a Black cultural way of speaking that we call code switching, which the Urban dictionary defines as customizing “style of speech to the audience or group being addressed.” Childress cleverly demonstrates this in “Trouble in Mind.” She gives the audience a peek into what we, as Black actors, must do to accommodate white audiences.In the beginning of the play, Wiletta tells John, a young actor, how to act around white people, explaining there are certain things you must do:WILETTA But don’t get too cocky. They don’t like that either. You have to cater to these fools too …JOHN I’m afraid I don’t know how to do that.WILETTA Laugh! Laugh at everything they say, makes ’em feel superior.JOHN Why do they have to feel superior?WILETTA You gonna sit there and pretend you don’t know why?JOHN I … I’d feel silly laughing at everything.WILETTA You don’t. Sometimes they laugh, you’re supposed to look serious, other times they serious, you supposed to laugh.The stereotypes have changed over the years — now there’s the hyper-masculinity of Black men; the strong Black woman who doesn’t seem to have a need for vulnerability or tenderness; Black children whose innocence has been removed — but the same rules still apply.LaChanze with Brandon Micheal Hall (who plays the young actor John), Chuck Cooper and Danielle Campbell in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Trouble” was optioned for Broadway, but never opened there because Childress would not tone down the dialogue for the show’s white producers. The white director in the play, Al Manners, tells Wiletta, “The American public is not ready to see you the way you want to be seen because, one, they don’t believe it, two, they don’t want to believe it, and three, they’re convinced they’re superior.” I have also had white male directors debate with me about what a Black woman would say, feel, even how she would dress.Childress was unapologetic about her intentions, even if it meant her work wouldn’t make it to Broadway in her lifetime. I have debated this with other artists, wondering whether she was even more brave than brilliant. But we agree that she was a truth teller, a soothsayer.As a student and young actor, I was astonished that the canon of Black American writers and artists that so richly shaped my artistic life were mostly unknown and so poorly understood. The play’s director, Charles Randolph-Wright, the first Black director with whom I have worked as a leading actor on Broadway, shepherded this project for 15 years. He also read the play in college and fell in love with Childress’s unapologetic writing.He is the champion of “Trouble in Mind.” Charles, who studied at Duke University and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, and danced with Alvin Ailey in New York, was told many times that he could not make this happen. It is as if, with her words in the play, Childress wrote directly to Charles six decades ago, “I’m sick of people signifyin’ we got no sense.” Charles wants to give her the voice she should have had before he and I were born.In our many conversations, I am invigorated in speaking to him about Black representation in the entertainment industry. Working with a director who I feel lives in my head is thrilling. My private thoughts that I’m sometimes too shy to share, Charles boldly speaks them before I can even get them out. Much like Childress, Charles is committed to telling the truth in his work and in having multidimensional portrayals of Black people, not just the broad strokes we see. And quite frankly, we’re both tired of seeing these examples. In my own career, I’ve taken jobs I didn’t want to do, but I had to play these parts because I needed a job.I get to work with a dedicated, resilient Black director, and a fearless, committed cast. Childress wanted to speak for the have-nots, the invisibles, and to share her eloquence with the Broadway community and universities across the world. She used her play about Black actors to explore the values of America. But some people weren’t ready, and so many people never got to hear her words. Now I proudly stand on her shoulders, opening my soul to her and teaching my daughters and other lovers of truth about her brilliance.“Some live by what they call great truths,” Wiletta says in the play. “I’ve always wanted to do somethin’ real grand … in the theater … to stand forth at my best … to stand up here and do anything I want …”And that’s exactly what Alice Childress did.LaChanze won the Tony Award for best actress in a leading role in a musical in 2006 for “The Color Purple.” In 2019, LaChanze and her eldest daughter, Celia Rose Gooding, became one of the few pairs of mothers and daughters to perform on Broadway as leading actors in the same season. More

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      Review: ‘Trouble in Mind,’ 66 Years Late and Still On Time

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      Alice Childress’s 1955 play about power and race in the theater is a satire and a tragedy that deserves to be a classic.So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. Whether despairing (“Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“Chicken & Biscuits”), broadly representative (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life. Like newspapers, too, they are remade every day; when I caught up with “Thoughts of a Colored Man” recently, it had been updated with a hot take on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.Yet for sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind,” which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway — a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” four years later — it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity.And justice, both broadly and narrowly, is the point. What begins as a backstage satire of white cluelessness and Black ingratiation gradually broadens and darkens into something far more mysterious: a peculiarly American tale of lost opportunity.Because Childress uses the play’s structure to express her theme, the ingratiation naturally comes first, and Charles Randolph-Wright’s lively staging leads with warmth and humor. As a mostly Black cast assembles on a perfectly period set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) to begin rehearsing an “anti-lynching” melodrama called “Chaos in Belleville,” their high-spirited chatter is often about fabricated résumés, mutual acquaintances and glorious triumphs past.Yet for Wiletta Mayer (LaChanze) — and for us as we listen — that past is already beginning to crack open. Though she rhapsodizes to the stage doorman (Simon Jones) about a song she once performed in a show called “Brownskin Melody,” she and her colleague Millie Davis (Jessica Frances Dukes) have more often been reduced to “flower” or “jewel” roles: stereotyped Black women with names like Gardenia, Magnolia, Crystal and Opal. In her most recent job, Millie says, “All I did was shout ‘Lord, have mercy!’ for almost two hours every night.”“Chaos in Belleville,” by a white playwright, is no better, despite its supposedly sympathetic theme. In it, Wiletta is set to play Ruby, and Millie to play Petunia: women working for a white family in the Jim Crow South. When Ruby’s son, Job, gets in trouble after daring to vote, the women are left, as usual, to wail and sing.LaChanze and Cooper, who, our critic writes, gives a brilliant, horrific aria that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes a lynching that his character witnessed as a child.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWiletta has no question that the play “stinks.” But then so does any mainstream play she can reasonably hope to book. An idealistic young actor like John Nevins (Brandon Micheal Hall) — who has been cast, in his first Broadway outing, as Job — may feel pride on becoming a part of the theater, but Wiletta knows better.“Colored folks ain’t in no theater,” she says. They are merely in a business.As such, she and Millie — soon joined by Sheldon Forrester (Chuck Cooper), an old hand playing Ruby’s husband — are experts at not rocking the boat. They dress beautifully (in costumes by Emilio Sosa) and feign enthusiasm. In a hilarious yet devastating scene, Wiletta advises John that, in order to feel comfortable, white producers and directors need Black actors to be walking contradictions. They should be “natural” talents yet experienced, not too needy and yet not too cocky, have no opinions except good ones and laugh at every joke.If this seems extreme, read about the experiences of Black theater artists today. The question they have been asking, in manifestoes and Twitter threads, is whether the systemic imbalance of power backstage is in any meaningful sense different from racism.Some 66 years ago, that was precisely Childress’s question as well, and once the white characters appear it starts to get answered. We see that even the most powerless of them — a put-upon stage manager (Alex Mickiewicz), a Yale-trained ingénue (Danielle Campbell) and a neurotic journeyman (Don Stephenson) — have more agency in their profession than any of the Black characters do. The journeyman, though not very good, never lacks for work. (Stephenson, though, is expert.) The ingénue complains that if “Chaos in Belleville” fails she’ll have to move back to her parents’ house in Connecticut, blithely unaware that Sheldon is probably one week’s salary short of homelessness.But it is of course the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), who sits at the top of the pecking order, pecking away at everyone’s nerves. An egoist whose veneer of open-mindedness is easily stripped away, he regularly explodes in nasty snits that today would be understood (and yet perhaps tolerated) as big-man harassment. Though he calls Wiletta “darling” and “my sweetheart,” his growing intransigence in response to her growing dissatisfaction is the primary source of conflict within the play.From left, Don Stephenson, Michael Zegen, Brandon Micheal Hall, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Jessica Frances Dukes in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheir fight is a fascinating knot of racial politics and dramatic theory. In Zegen’s apt take, Manners has the reptilian insouciance of a would-be Elia Kazan, bringing to the stage the new techniques of Method acting he has learned as a hack in Hollywood. Yet Manners’s demands are completely incoherent, and as Wiletta fails to satisfy him despite “justifying” and “relating to” the nonsensical dialogue she’s given, she realizes that “Chaos in Belleville” is in fact racist — and, in defending it, so is he.LaChanze gets that arc just right in a wonderfully rangy and compelling performance. At first confident that she can continue to game an unfair system, her Wiletta becomes almost existentially confused as insight floods in; when finally she regains her clarity and resolves not to participate in her own degradation, it has the weight of both victory and defeat in one choice.By then, we understand that “Trouble in Mind,” its title taken from a classic blues song about suicide, is, for all its backstage comedy, a tragedy of waste — not, like lynching, the waste of what happens so much as the waste of what doesn’t.All the Black characters, but none of the white ones, know that tragedy intimately. At one point, Sheldon, who spends most of “Chaos in Belleville” saying “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and whittling pointlessly at a stick, casually remarks that unlike that play’s author and director he has actually witnessed a lynching. Cooper then gives us a brilliant, horrific aria, filled with Method detail, that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes, and at the same time makes you understand how much of America’s talent has been squandered.That includes Childress, a figure who looks in hindsight a lot like Wiletta. It was because she refused to license a softened ending that “Trouble in Mind” did not make the move to Broadway after its Off Broadway success; none of her later work made it to Broadway either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important — or that, in our day, as this eye-opening production demonstrates, we can’t make it important again.Trouble in MindThrough Jan. 9 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      Alice Childress Finally Gets to Make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway

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      Wiletta Mayer walks into the theater already knowing how things will go. Smartly dressed, attractive and middle-aged (don’t ask for a number, because “a woman that’ll tell her age will tell anything”), she is a veteran actress who’s played maids and mammies and knows how to cater to white directors and producers. You can call it “Uncle Tomming.” Or you can call it plain common sense. Either way, it’s a living.Until enough is enough.Alice Childress created Wiletta Mayer, the protagonist of her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” to paint a realistic portrait of what it was to be Black in the theater industry. Or to be more accurate: She wanted to portray what it is to be Black in theater, because 66 years later, as the play opens on Broadway in a Roundabout Theater Company production, the words Childress wrote remain just as relevant.And yet this author and play, a comedy-drama about an interracial cast rehearsing an anti-lynching play written by a white author and led by a white director, haven’t gotten their proper due in the decades since its premiere. Childress was supposed to be the first Black female playwright on Broadway, with a play critiquing the racism and misogyny of the theater industry.Thanks to interfering white theatermakers and a Broadway unwelcoming to challenging Black art, things didn’t turn out as planned. But the content of the play, and its troubled production history, prove how rightly “Trouble in Mind” and its author should be celebrated as part of the canon.From left: Chuck Cooper, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Michael Zegen in “Trouble in Mind,” which will have its long-awaited Broadway opening night this month.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the play, Wiletta arrives for her part in “Chaos in Belleville” alongside a young Black actor named John; an older Black actor named Sheldon; a younger Black actress named Millie; and two white actors, Judy, a well-meaning yet naïve Yale graduate, and Bill, a neurotic character actor. The play within the play is about a Black man who dares to vote and is killed for it.During rehearsals Wiletta tries to give the newcomer John tips on how to survive as a Black actor in the business, but her own advice fails when the white director, Al Manners, pushes her to perpetuate stereotypes.It’s a familiar scenario, one Childress encountered herself as a young actress in the 1944 Broadway production of “Anna Lucasta.” She based Wiletta on the character actress Georgia Burke, who appeared with her in that production. Like Wiletta, Burke had also done her fair share of mammy roles, and she would later appear in the original Broadway “Porgy and Bess.”Burke had problems with the director of “Anna Lucasta,” but Childress knew her to complain only to her fellow Black actors; when it came to white directors and producers she kept quiet for the sake of her career.In “Trouble in Mind,” Childress wrote a version of Burke who finally had to speak up.“Darling, don’t think. You’re great until you start thinking,” Al Manners says to Wiletta during rehearsals. That kind of condescending treatment may have been par for the course for Black theater performers. Childress, however, was uncompromising.“She was a woman of amazing integrity,” said Kathy Perkins, Childress’s friend and the editor of a major anthology of her plays. (She is also the lighting designer for Roundabout’s production.) “She hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”Childress, at left, with actors rehearsing the premiere of “Trouble in Mind” in 1955.Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIt’s this integrity — or, more accurately, the times choking a great writer of integrity — that cost Childress Broadway. In an ironic echo of the play’s plot, Childress found herself at odds with the would-be director when “Trouble in Mind” was slated for its Off Broadway premiere. Unwilling to budge, she took over as co-director, along with the actress Clarice Taylor, who starred as Wiletta.The play premiered on Nov. 5, 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theater, and ran for 91 performances.But that version isn’t the version we know today.The white producers were concerned about the play’s ending, which they thought was too negative. According to Perkins, as a relatively new playwright Childress was intimidated by these experienced producers.And then there was the rest of the cast and crew to think about. Childress was a fierce advocate for unions and workers’ rights, and feared that pulling the play would cost everyone their jobs. So she conceded, providing an ending of reconciliation and racial harmony, even though she maintained that it was unrealistic.The New York Times praised the play as “a fresh, lively and cutting satire” — except for the ending. Childress always regretted the change, and said she’d never compromise her artistic integrity again. So when “Trouble in Mind” was optioned for Broadway with the happy ending and a new title (“So Early Monday Morning”), Childress refused. She would have been the first Black female playwright to see her work there; instead, that honor would go to Lorraine Hansberry four years later, for “A Raisin in the Sun.”Childress, who died in 1994, never had the financial success nor popular recognition that her work merited in her lifetime. It’s unfortunate because her plays are works of merit. Many of her works, like “Florence” (1949), “Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White” (1966) and “Wine in the Wilderness” (1969), are confrontational without being pandering or preachy. Not simply about race, they are also about gender and class and artistry, and challenge their audiences to look at their own prejudices and misconceptions. (Theater for a New Audience is reviving “Wedding Band,” a tale of interracial love set amid the 1918 flu pandemic, Off Broadway this spring.)And they’re clever. The meta structure of “Trouble in Mind” makes Childress’s satire especially poignant; it’s both explicitly biting and subtly searing.Childress, at right, with James Broderick and Ruby Dee, the stars of the 1972 production of her play “Wedding Band.” Theater for a New Audience will present a revival in 2022.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesOne reason Childress is often left out of conversations about the American canon is her style. In an essay in “The Cambridge Companion to African-American Theater,” the historian and dramaturge Adrienne Macki Braconi calls Childress a “transitional” writer, unheralded because her work reflects “the conventions of dramatic realism.”“Critics often overlook their subtle variations on the form, including such innovations as bold thematic content; assertive, complex female characters; and a focus on lower-class and middle-class blacks,” Macki Braconi wrote of Childress and the writer Eulalie Spence.Sandra Shannon, a scholar of Black theater and emeritus professor of African-American literature at Howard University, maintained that Childress’s blend of naturalistic dialogue and social commentary put her “at the top of her game” among playwrights in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Her plays, Shannon said, “raise awareness, stop short of just getting out and marching in the streets.”And La Vinia Delois Jennings, the author of the 1995 book “Alice Childress” and a distinguished professor in the humanities at the University of Tennessee, pointed out the “dynamism” of Childress’s works, which so often feature Black women taking agency. The stereotypical trope of the angry Black woman gets turned on its head, Jennings said, proving that anger can be “liberating — a force that brings about change.”But for all of Childress’s dynamism, it still took over 60 years to get her work to a Broadway stage.A 1950 portrait of Alice Childress, painted by Alice Neel, was included in a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art show.The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner; The Collection of Art BerlinerCharles Randolph-Wright, who will be directing the Broadway production, said he’s been eyeing this play for the big stage for more than a decade.On June 20, 2011, a nonprofit called Project1Voice hosted an event in which 19 theaters across the country did readings of “Trouble in Mind.” Randolph-Wright directed a Roundabout reading at the American Airlines Theater, which included André De Shields, Leslie Uggams, Bill Irwin and LaChanze, who will be starring as Wiletta in the full production at the same Broadway venue.“I’ll never forget everyone coming up to me saying, ‘Did you rewrite this?’ and I was like, ‘No, she wrote this in 1955.’ And they said, ‘But you tweaked it —’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t touch one thing,” Randolph-Wright explained.After all, theater insiders and outsiders are still loudly calling for improved representation more than a half-century later.“There’s been a false sense of progress. That progress has been in fits and starts,” Shannon said. “The same issues that Childress deals with, or dealt with in the 1950s with ‘Trouble in Mind,’ have always been bubbling beneath the surface. They’ve never gone away.”In one scene in the play, Manners says, “I want truth. What is truth? Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe, that is all. You must have integrity about your work.”Though the statement comes from a flawed character, the sentiment is Childress all the way. Perkins said that at the end of the day, Childress wouldn’t say she was writing for white audiences or Black audiences; she only wrote for herself, and she concerned herself first and foremost with the truth, whatever form that would take.Randolph-Wright said he thinks of John Lewis when he approaches the play. “It is ‘good trouble,’ ” he said, referring to the call to action made famous by the activist and congressman. “It agitates, it illuminates, it makes you laugh, it’s entertaining.”But he hopes this production will only be the beginning — that audiences will learn more about Childress’s work, and that she and other Black writers will get greater recognition for their contributions to the art form. Because this moment — after Black Lives Matter and “We See You, White American Theater,” and when seven new Broadway plays this fall are by Black writers — is perfect for Childress, but also for Spence and Ed Bullins and Angelina Weld Grimké and other Black playwrights past and present.So will change really come this time around? The version of “Trouble in Mind” that’s finally arriving on Broadway ends inconclusively, not optimistically. The ending Childress’s producers rejected back in 1955 seems right for right now. More