Trouble In Mind by Alice Childress, and: Wedding Band by Alice Childress (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Trouble In Mind by Alice Childress, and: Wedding Band by Alice Childress Melissa Barton TROUBLE IN MIND. By Alice Childress. Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. Roundabout Theatre Company, New York. December 11, 2021. WEDDING BAND. By Alice Childress. Directed by Awoye Timpo. Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn. May 14, 2022. If Alice Childress is having a moment, one can’t help but wonder what she herself would have to say about it. There’s no doubt that Childress deserves to be remembered, most of all as the author of plays and fiction freighted with irony and wit, shimmering with hope, shot through with ambivalence and ambiguity. She felt her career to have been thwarted by prejudice, and she certainly craved the Broadway marquee she never graced in her lifetime. Yet it’s difficult to know how she would greet her Broadway premiere in 2021, framed as a rescue from a half-century of obscurity. The 2021–2022 season in New York City saw, seemingly coincidentally, two major revivals of Childress’s plays, each marketed as the resurrection of a lost genius. Both productions were couched in larger, overarching efforts by their sponsoring organizations to bring more Black plays to prominent stages—Roundabout’s “Refocus Project” collaboration with Black Theatre United, and Awoye Timpo’s organization CLASSIX. Both productions could be seen as responding, as well, to “We See [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution LaChanze as Wiletta in Trouble in Mind. Photo by Joan Marcus. [End Page 94] You, White American Theater,” a manifesto issued in 2020 by a broad coalition of theatre makers calling for greater diversity both backstage and onstage. To be fair, director Randolph-Wright, a Roundabout board member, had long wanted to stage Trouble in Mind; he directed a workshop reading 15 years ago, and Timpo similarly has had a longstanding interest in Childress. But when organizations committed to the classics resurrect old plays that are suddenly considered of the moment, it invites the question: are Childress’s plays newly timely, or are they newly timeless? Childress herself has a lot to teach us about the difference. The plays certainly have a timely topicality, reminding us that white supremacy remains very much with us. And yet what is perhaps the most time-worn about the selection of these plays is their use as diversity programming: as Childress told James V. Hatch in 1972, the Greenwich Mews Theater produced Trouble in Mind in 1955 because “people were demanding that they do something Black.” The producers pressured Childress to make the play’s ambivalent resolution more cheerful and hopeful, and Childress capitulated, though she soon regretted it. Two years slogging through rewrites caused her to abandon a Broadway transfer, even though it would have made her the first Black woman playwright to be produced on the Great White Way—four years ahead of Lorraine Hansberry. Life very closely imitated art, since Trouble in Mind is a backstage “comedy-drama,” depicting a similar argument in rehearsals for Chaos in Belleville, a fictionalized, putatively anti-racist play. The director “Al Manners,” a pious mid-century liberal partly modeled on Elia Kazan and other Actors Studio contemporaries, and played in the Roundabout production by a wonderfully unctuous Michael Zegen, tells his cast, “We’re making one, beautiful, clear, point…violence is wrong […] It does not matter to me that they’re Negroes. Black, white, green, or purple, I maintain there is only one race…the human race.” The statement rings like the cocking of Chekhov’s gun. Before the play’s end, Manners has been exposed as a racist, and the star, Wiletta, has refused to perform, causing the production to crumble. Trouble in Mind is a tonal masterpiece, and director Randolph-Wright and the nine-member cast nimbly handled the play’s comedic opening beats of interwoven banter. Chaos in Belleville, the play being produced within Trouble in Mind, is an anti-lynching melodrama in the vein of white southerner Paul Green’s work from the 1920s. Both 1955 and 2021 audiences winkingly recognized the play as “problematic.” Trouble in Mind is not an anti-lynching play per se, even though it includes...