Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress

First produced: 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theater, New York, New York

First published: 1971

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Problem play

Time of work: 1957

Locale: New York, New York

Principal Characters:

• Wiletta Mayer, a mature actor who loves the theater
• Al Manners, the volatile director of Chaos in Belleville, his first Broadway show
• Sheldon Forrester, an elderly actor who plays stereotypical poor blacks
• Millie Davis, an attractive black actress who dresses stylishly
• John Nevins, an idealistic African American youth
• Judy Sears, a young white actress
• Bill O’Wray, a white character actor

The Play

Trouble in Mind takes place on a Broadway stage where a group of actors are rehearsing a predictable southern melodrama, Chaos in Belleville, written and produced by whites and filled with racial stereotypes. Wiletta Mayer enters, speaking kindly to an elderly doorman who recognizes her from a musical in which she played years ago. A moment later John Nevins appears, thrilled with this opportunity. Wiletta advises the young man from her experience in white-dominated theater: He must not acknowledge he has studied drama, which might sound presumptuous, but should say that he appeared in Porgy and Bess, although he did not. She tells John to play the role of subservient black in order to succeed, and never to let director Al Manners know how much he really wants this job. The play, she admits, “stinks.” John, however, is sure that he will be a star, and she realizes that her advice is wasted.

Other cast members drift onstage. Millie Davis enters in a mink coat, commenting that she does not care if she works or not. Sheldon Forrester and Judy Sears follow. Sheldon has been ill and laments his loss of work. Judy, who is white, has just graduated from Yale; this is her first professional role, and she is enthusiastic but awkward. To demonstrate that she is not prejudiced, she ventures her belief that “people are the same,” unaware that others see this as a denial of their experience as African Americans.

Manners, who directed a Civil War film in which Sheldon and Wiletta appeared, enters. He exhibits unconscious racist and sexist attitudes by ordering coffee and Danish for the cast but ignoring Sheldon’s request for jelly doughnuts. Noticing Judy, Manners moves too close to her; when she backs away, he takes offense. He praises John for his dramatic training (which has not been mentioned), but Judy, who volunteers her Yale background, is dismissed. When she makes a mistake, he parades her forcibly around the stage, then throws paper on the stage in a tantrum. Although others jump to retrieve the paper, Manners orders Wiletta to pick it up. Wiletta, startled, responds, “I ain’t the damn janitor!” Embarrassed, Manners tries to pretend that all of them have been acting.

In Chaos in Belleville, Wiletta and Sheldon play John’s sharecropper parents. Wiletta tells Manners that she knows what he wants from her song (Ruby, her character, sings whenever she is worried), but he insists that she probe Ruby’s motivation and think about what she is feeling. Ruby’s son Job is about to be lynched because he dared to vote, and Ruby refuses to help him, which seems unnatural to Wiletta. Soon she can neither sing nor read the way Manners wants. He forces her to get angry, then is appalled by the depth of her emotion.

After Manners leaves the stage, Wiletta struggles with a headache from the tension. Sheldon tries to comfort her, saying that they should not mind humiliation because they are trying to accomplish something. However, Wiletta insists that she does mind. “Yeah, we all mind,” Sheldon admits, echoing the play’s title, “but you got to swaller what you mind.”

In act 2, Bill O’Wray rehearses his big speech as Renard, the white landowner. His plea for racial tolerance sounds impressive, but it is filled with platitudes. Job’s parents wait anxiously for his arrival. Wiletta, as Ruby, sings and prays for her son; Sheldon, as Job’s father, whittles and prays; both are symbolically impotent. Ruby orders Job, who has voted against her wishes, to kneel: “Tell ’em you sorry, tell ’em you done wrong!” She directs him to give himself up to the oncoming mob.

Wiletta, still trying to make her role work, questions why a black woman would knowingly send her son to his death. Why can’t the boy escape? “We don’t want to antagonize the audience,” Manners explains. “We’re making one beautiful, clear point . . . violence is wrong.” Then Sheldon, the only person who has actually seen a lynching, talks about it in simple and terrible detail. Wiletta reverses herself: “John, I told you everything wrong.” Passive agreement is no longer possible for her.

After a lunch break, Manners charges Wiletta with deliberately sabotaging the play by showing anger. Ignoring the stage directions, Wiletta as Ruby tries to raise John as Job off his knees. She challenges Manners: “Tell me, why this boy’s people turned against him? . . . I’m his mother and I’m sendin’ him to his death. This is a lie. . . . The writer wants the damn white man to be the hero.” She demands, “Would you do this to a son of yours?”

Manners responds with self-pity, telling her that the American public is not ready for what she wants. He suggests that making the white audience feel sorry for the black characters is a worthy goal. When Wiletta repeats her question, he flares, “Don’t compare yourself to me! . . . Don’t compare [John] with my son, they’ve got nothing in common,” and rages off. Millie tries to make peace, urging everyone to go out for coffee and talk.

Wiletta is consoled by the doorman. She knows there will be no phone call for her for tomorrow’s rehearsal, but, she says, “I’m gonna show up. . . . He’ll have to fire me.” At the play’s end, the doorman listens admiringly as Wiletta quotes Psalm 133 in a ringing voice: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” There has been chaos on the stage this day, but now Wiletta stands firm and steady.

There are at least three versions of Trouble in Mind. The two-act published version discussed here incorporates material added after the original performance, specifically references to the 1955-1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and the 1957 school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. Critic Doris E. Abramson also cites a three-act manuscript that Childress considers “definitive.” The three-act version ends on a more hopeful note as Manners comes to negotiation: “I, a prejudiced man, ask you, a prejudiced cast, to wait until our prejudiced author arrives tomorrow. I propose that we sit down in mutual blindness and try to find a way to bring some splinter of truth to a prejudiced audience.” This speech also gives him more depth and complexity.

Critical Context

Childress, an actor and an original member of the American Negro Theater company, codirected Trouble in Mind, her first full-length play, which ran for ninety-one performances. The work earned Childress an Obie Award for the best original Off-Broadway play, the first ever won by a black woman. An important statement of the play is its attack on the white retelling of African American experience and the refusal of blacks to insist on the truth. Thus, when Trouble in Mind was scheduled for Broadway, Childress refused to execute script changes that would make the play more palatable to a white audience, a decision strongly supported by her colleagues, and the project was canceled.

Childress, the great-granddaughter of a slave, was hailed as “the mother of professional black theater in America.” Her fourteen plays include the one-act Florence (pr. 1949, pb. 1950), and Just a Little Simple (pr. 1950), a musical-revue adaptation of Langston Hughes’s book Simple Speaks His Mind (1950). Just a Little Simple and Gold Through the Trees (pr. 1952) were the first plays by a black woman to be professionally produced with unionized actors. Childress also wrote four books; her young adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award.

In a theater that historically excluded women and blacks, Childress established new ground and made possible the emergence of many black women playwrights. As an African American, she commanded the attention of black audiences and also of whites. Her concern for plain speaking never wavered. She once vowed that “I will not keep quiet, and I will not stop telling the truth.”

Bibliography

Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. A good overview, by decade, of African American playwrights and plays produced in New York’s professional theater. Includes an analysis of Trouble in Mind. Abramson praises Childress for refusing to compromise her ideals but regrets her tendency to sermonize.

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. An extensive study of the pioneering work of Childress, among others, and of the unique vision of black women playwrights. Brown-Guillory views Childress as “a writer of great discipline, power, substance, wit, and integrity.”

Childress, Alice. “A Candle in a Gale Wind.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Discusses her early life, motivation (“the Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it”), themes, and subject matter. Childress notes that being a woman does not present as much difficulty for her as being black does.

Hay, Samuel A. “Alice Childress’s Dramatic Structure.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. An analysis of the structure of four of Childress’s plays. Notes that she uses a traditional structure of beginning-middle-end in Trouble in Mind but allows theme rather than character to dominate, and she reveals this theme not through her characters but through argumentation.

Mitchell, Loften. “The Negro Writer and His Materials.” In The American Negro Writer and His Roots: Selected Papers. New York: American Society of African Culture, 1960. Reports comments made by Childress in a panel discussion. She expresses the general resentment against being told to write universally, without regard to race or controversy. African American writers “have much to say about white society ’and we must say it. . . . For they cannot write what we see.”

Washington, Mary Helen. “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, edited by Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Traces Childress’s activities as a radical activist and the importance of her organizing for her writing (and vice versa).