39 pages • 1 hour read
Trouble in Mind
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Background
Authorial Context: Alice Childress
Alice Childress (1916-1994) was a prominent Black playwright, novelist, and actress whose career spanned over four decades. She was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but moved to Harlem, New York, at the age of nine to live with her grandmother following the split of her parents. There, her grandmother (the daughter of an enslaved person) encouraged Childress to pursue the formal education she never had access to herself. She attended public school through middle school and part of high school, though she had to drop out after her grandmother passed away. Childress did not attend college, but instead immediately started her career in theater.
Childress had an expansive career as an actress before she became a playwright. Most notably she was in the cast of the American Negro Theater’s (ANT) production of Anna Lucasta, which transferred to Broadway in 1944 and went on to become the longest running all-Black play on Broadway. In 1949, she wrote her first play, a one-act named Florence, and she directed and starred in the first production of it. In 1950 she adapted Langston Hughes’ novel, Simple Speaks His Mind, into a play called Just a Little Simple, and she gained further notoriety with her 1952 work Gold Through the Trees.
Trouble in Mind was Childress’s first full-length play, and it debuted Off-Broadway in 1955 at the Greenwich Mews Theater. It was set to premiere on Broadway in 1957, under the condition that the play be edited to have a softer political message. Childress refused to change her work, and the premiere was canceled. Childress was meant to be the first female Black playwright on Broadway, but this distinction went to Lorraine Hansberry for A Raisin in the Sun in 1957 due to the cancelation of Trouble in Mind. In 2021, the play had its long overdue Broadway premiere at Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre. Her next full-length dramatic work, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (written in 1962), centered on a forbidden interracial romance in South Carolina during World War I. It didn’t premiere in New York until 1972, and was staged again in 2022 for New York Audiences.
Childress’s body of work includes 13 plays (the last of which was written in 1987, seven years before her death), five novels, and numerous newspaper columns. She accumulated a number of awards, some of which include one from Off-Broadway Magazine for Trouble in Mind (1956), the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Honor for her novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, the Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts in 1980, and the Harold S. Prince Lifetime Achievement Award from Drama Desk (2022, posthumous).
Historical-Cultural Context: 20th Century Activism and Artistic Representation in the US
Trouble in Mind was written in 1955, less than a decade before the height of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. In addition to her work as an actress and writer, Childress was known for her activism, so it’s unsurprising that her views bled into her plays. Trouble in Mind was ahead of its time, and bravely called out not just the blatant racism in America, but also the ways in which self-proclaimed “progressive” entertainment can often do just as much damage as overt racism. The play addresses different kinds of white artists who continue the cycle of racism in the industry: the young, sheltered white girl who has an Ivy League degree and says she wants audiences to learn “that people are people” (18), the arrogant white director who blames the producers in power for not telling the truth about Black stories on stage or screen, the skittish white stage manager who is at the beck and call of the director, and the older white actor who is resistant to change.
Each of these characters is much different from the more obvious racist characters that have been portrayed in media up until this time. For perhaps the first time, white audiences who didn’t think of themselves as racist saw the harm in micro-aggressions, or ignoring the Black voices in the room and shooting them down with comments that try to erase race altogether. One example of this is when Wiletta first tries to speak up about her character, Manners says “Black, white, green or purple, I maintain there is only one race…the human race” (68) to dismiss Wiletta’s argument.
The historical context of its 2021 premiere is equally important to the historical context in which it was originally written. 2021 saw the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the return to Broadway after an 18-month hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During this closure, several industries were challenged to re-examine the systemic oppression they upheld, including the entertainment industry. Trouble in Mind turned out to be equally powerful all these years later, and just as timely.
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