For most of its life in the theatre, Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind has existed primarily as a text. It was published in a series of anthologies that sought to recuperate underrepresented voices in US theatre: first, in Lindsay Patterson’s 1971 Black Theater: A 20th Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, and then in Darwin T. Turner’s 1994 edition of Black Drama in America: An Anthology and Judith E. Barlow’s 1994 Plays by American Women: 1930-1960.[1] Following its 1955 premiere production off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, Trouble in Mind was produced sporadically, primarily at theatres dedicated to producing the work of Black playwrights—such as a 1979 New York City production at Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre, a 1984 Chicago production by the Kuumba Theatre Company, the play’s 1992 UK premiere at London’s Tricycle Theatre, and a 1998 production by the Negro Ensemble Company—to accompany occasional stagings on university and college campuses. Recently, it has received renewed attention amid the wider recuperation of Alice Childress as a major 20th-century Black playwright, including: productions at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2007 and 2019; a 2010 production at the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, California; a 2011 production by Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; a 2011 production by Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland; a 2016 production at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota; a 2017 production at the Theatre Royal Bath; and its much-belated arrival on Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre in 2021.[2] This recent flurry of productions notwithstanding, for roughly 50 years prior to its Broadway premiere (which the New York Times called, “66 years late and still on time”), Trouble in Mind was circulated, read, imagined, analyzed, and critiqued predominantly as a text—as a literary object produced by an author—rather than as a play to be produced onstage.[3] Its textual life has exerted a strong though unacknowledged influence on the imagination and interpretation of the play. My essay “Alice Childress’s Troubling Method: Theatrical ‘Truth’ and the Cold War Politics of Rehearsing Racial Authenticity” (published in Theatre Journal vol. 77, no. 2) seeks to remediate the general overemphasis on Trouble in Mind as a textual object by attending more fully to Childress’s career as a theatre practitioner, her vision for a Black “people’s theatre,” and her communist activism as integral to her dramaturgy.[4] This historiographical project requires not only a turn to the material archive but also a reflexive engagement with archive, text, and context that invites reconsideration of prevailing narratives and conventional wisdom about the play and its history.
Despite its premiere production that occurred off-Broadway during the year that OBIE Awards were inaugurated, Childress’s most famous work did not leave as significant a visual record as might be expected of a play of its stature.[5] A mere three photographs comprise the visual record of the 1955 premiere production of this major 20th-century work of Black theatre. The first and most publicly accessible is a production photo published in the New York Times alongside their review of the play’s inaugural production; due to the lack of any photo credit printed with the image, it is not available for reproduction.[6] The New York Public Library (NYPL) holds two additional photographs: one by Julius Lazarus, which has only been reproduced once digitally (in a NYPL blog about the play’s archive), and another by Milton Meltzer.[7] All three photos clearly stage scenes from Trouble in Mind that focus on the play’s characters in the midst of their rehearsal of the play-within-a-play Chaos in Belleville. The New York Times image features Clarice Taylor and Liam Lenihan in a scene in which their characters—the Black actress Wiletta Mayer and the Irish American stage doorman Pop/Henry, respectively—share a quiet moment together in the rehearsal room. The Lazarus photograph captures a scene in which Hilda Haynes (as the Black actress Millie Davis) sits behind the actors portraying the play’s three white male characters—Hal England (as stage manager Eddie Fenton), James McMahon (as director Al Manners), and Lenihan (as Pop/Henry)—who engage in a discussion, seemingly about the applause machine that sits prominently on the stage manager’s table. The third photograph, taken by Meltzer, depicts several performers from the premiere production of Trouble in Mind in full character costume: Hilda Haynes (as actor Millie Davis), James McMahon (as director Al Manners), Stephanie Elliot (as actor Judy Sears), and Charles Bettis (as actor John Nevins).[8] Haynes, Elliot, and Bettis sit on lightweight chairs typical of rehearsal rooms as McMahon stands behind them as a subtly looming presence; the words “Dressing Room” with an arrow pointing outside the photographic frame are conspicuously placed on the wall behind the characters, asserting the scene’s setting.
Yet, despite all the extant images from the 1955 premiere production focusing on quotidian moments of the rehearsal process, the rehearsal room has remained strikingly absent from consideration of the play. To illustrate this point, let us consider the third of these photographs, which captures both the central role of the rehearsal room in Childress’s play and its strange absence from the archive. The description of the Meltzer photo in the NYPL online database reads, “Hilda Haynes, James McMahon, Stephanie Elliot and Charles Bettis in rehearsal for the stage production Trouble in Mind.”[9] Notably, the archival description asserts that the image is a documentary photograph that captured an actual moment from Trouble in Mind’s rehearsal process. There is no indication that the play itself dramatizes a rehearsal room, nor is there any mention that the actors might have been posing for the camera, in character, with their characters having been artfully blocked to communicate their relationships to one another, as is customary for production photographs. While there is a small possibility that the photograph is a documentary photograph of actors actually rehearsing Childress’s play (rather than acting as characters who are rehearsing another play), it is notable that the Trouble in Mind’s setting in the rehearsal room disappears in the archive. Yet, in Trouble in Mind, this very setting enables Childress to metatheatrically dramatize actors both on- and off-stage, performing in a scripted drama and in everyday life (and sometimes in both simultaneously), and acting out both intentionally and not. By contrast, the NYPL archival description operates according to an unspoken logic that posits actors as either performing or not, onstage or behind the scenes, signaling the persistent tendency of historical documentation—and, often, of performance history—to simplify and flatten the many varieties of “performance” that are entailed by theatrical production and to affirm physical evidence as the source of self-evident truth.
There is therefore a potent irony in the potential confusion of a staged photograph of a play about the vicissitudes of theatrical representation with a documentary artifact of everyday life: it is precisely a multivariant understanding of performance and its relationship to “truth” that recurrently arises in Trouble in Mind. Throughout the play, Childress offers extensive commentary and reflection on the slipperiness of “truth” and its nonaxiomatic relation to performance—especially in relation to the director’s privileged role in the authentication of “truthful” performance. As a historical artifact, then, this photograph and its archival categorization demonstrate a central challenge of performance historiography. How do we, as performance scholars and historians, engage in our own production of theatrical “truth”? How might our familiar, mythic narratives obscure other stories and perspectives? Or, indeed, how often do we overlook readily accessible evidence simply because it does not fit prevailing narratives, epistemic frameworks, and political paradigms? In sum, we might ask: how might we produce better, more rigorous, and more representative “truths” about historical performances that account for the nuances and complexities attendant on all performances?
These questions draw inspiration directly from Childress’s dramaturgy and inform my essay. They gesture toward the need for performance historiography that interprets archival objects by relating them to performance as a process, much as Childress’s Trouble in Mind is a play that critiques the objectifying racist stereotypes of US theatre by dramatizing how they are produced. Theatre and performance studies is uniquely positioned to pursue this methodological approach, which relies on extensive knowledge of the inner workings of performance practices and theatrical modes of production. Yet, practicing this scholarly method requires grappling with the historical elision of the rehearsal room in literary studies and related academic fields that approach dramatic analysis primarily in textual terms. Within these discourses, the processes of performance-making captured in a photograph or other archival documentation—including in a script—frequently are elided or confused with the object that contains their trace.
Indeed, the scholarship on Trouble in Mind offers another rich example of the frequent omission of the rehearsal room and the collaborative processes of acting and directing in favor of the figure of the singular author of a dramatic text. Amid the run-up to its 2021 Broadway premiere by the Roundabout Theater Company, the New York Times recapitulated a widely circulated narrative about Childress and her play:
[T]his 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.[10]
Here, the Times references the infamous failure of Trouble in Mind to receive a Broadway production despite a 1957 press announcement that it was to be revived, revised, and brought uptown under the new title So Early Monday Morning—a production that would have predated Lorraine Hansberry’s watershed 1959 Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun.[11] The centrality of this abortive Broadway production to the oft-repeated popular narrative surrounding Trouble in Mind stems from the earliest scholarship on Trouble in Mind, Doris E. Abramson’s synopsis of the play in her 1967 book Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, which introduced Childress as “a crusader and a writer who resists comprise.” Abramson substantiates this characterization of Childress as a dramatist with her description of the “case” of the play’s abortive Broadway premiere:
Trouble in Mind, [Childress’s] first full-length play, [...] was produced off-Broadway in 1955. It was subsequently optioned for Broadway, but quarrels about theme, statement, and interpretation led Miss Childress to withdraw her work. The producer kept asking for changes in the script that would have made it a “heart-warming little story,” something that it most assuredly is not.[12]
The 2021 Times account, however, adds to the narrative a common corollary by drawing an ironic parallel between Childress’s failed attempt to bring Trouble in Mind to Broadway and the struggle of Trouble’s protagonist, Wiletta Mayer, to convince her white director and playwright to dramatize Black life more fully and realistically. This uncanny parallel between Childress’s struggles with the white supremacy of US theatre and Wiletta’s dramatic conflict with white racists in Trouble in Mind works well to summarize the interrelation between Childress’s life as an artist and the artistry that she crafted from her lived experiences. These historical anecdotes effectively condense the complex phenomena of racist theatre practices into a single compelling narrative. Derived in part from Kathy A. Perkins’s succinct observation in her introduction to Childress’s Selected Plays, this narrative provides a consistent frame within which Trouble in Mind most often is interpreted as “a case of life mirroring art.”[13]
Yet, much like the description of the NYPL photograph of the 1955 premiere production that confuses the dramatization of a rehearsal with a rehearsal of the drama, this popular narrative subtly confuses life with art and art with life. As Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wryly notes, “Much—almost too much—has been made about Alice Childress’s refusal to bring a compromised version of Trouble in Mind to Broadway and become the first play by an African-American woman to tread those boards.”[14] For Jacobs-Jenkins, the “almost too much” emphasis on Childress’s biography allows for her play’s structural critique of the US theatre industry to be reduced to a story of an individual playwright’s experience of racism which ostensibly might be remediated with a single, belated Broadway production of the play—rather than, for instance, viewing the US theatre industry’s enduring and entrenched racism in its actual size and scope, which would necessitate something like the thoroughgoing restructuring of the industry outlined by We See You White American Theatre.[15] While Jacobs-Jenkins perceptively identifies the practical risks stemming from paying “almost too much” attention to Childress, it is worth also noting that this overemphasis on Childress’s biography has also led to a reimagination of the play that subtly conflates the character Wiletta with Childress and that attenuates consideration of the play’s unambiguous focus on the rehearsal room as a site of theatrical production.
Viewing Wiletta as a stand-in for Childress requires a tacit assumption that there is an obvious homology between the two. Yet, this assumption makes little sense given that the stage character Wiletta is a working actor who experiences discrimination on Broadway as an actor and Childress was a playwright who experienced discrimination from Broadway as a playwright. While Childress was herself an actor and a director, such interpretations of Wiletta as an author-figure who surrogates Childress do not so much draw connections between Childress’s playwrighting and her previous experiences onstage as they transform Wiletta from an actor behaving as an actor might in the rehearsal room into a playwright-in-waiting, implicitly interpreting Wiletta’s character arc as a mirror of Childress’s personal trajectory. In such interpretations, scholars have relied on an unstated presumption that dramatic authority rests with the author and not with the actor, thereby ironically affirming the theatrical division of labor that Childress’s play critiques. Here, life does not mirror art—or, at the very least, life mirrors art by distorting art in life’s image.[16]
Notably, Childress is on the record as having based the character of Wiletta on a combination of herself and fellow American Negro Theatre actor Georgia Burke (1878-1985). Her specific wording, though, makes clear that Burke was the primary basis for the character, with supplemental characteristics drawn from Childress’s personal history:
My experience acting in Anna Lucasta on Broadway contributed a lot [to Trouble in Mind]. I based Wiletta on Georgia Burke, someone who had also played in Anna Lucasta. Georgia Burke, was a person who went along, went along, went along. Some days she said, “I’m tired of it.” And I thought, “She has the spirit that could be Wiletta’s.” She didn’t go through what I wrote, but she had the right spirit. So the character of Georgia Burke became very influential in the writing of Trouble in Mind.[17]
For Childress, Wiletta was based on the experiences and the “spirit” of two Black actors on Broadway—and not on Childress’s personal experiences as a playwright seeking to be produced on Broadway. The historiographical myths around Trouble in Mind, then, frequently confuse the play’s main character as an authorial surrogate commenting on playwrighting and dramaturgy rather than as a working actor simply trying to do her job—a job that, notably, requires hard-earned expertise in dramatic analysis, performance methods, and character research.
My essay “Alice Childress’s Troubling Method” starts from the premise that Childress was a playwright with profound political and aesthetic investments in the means of producing more “authentic” Black theatre, and that she drew deeply from her experiences as an actor and director. Other historical details regarding the actual 1955 off-Broadway premiere of Trouble in Mind—rather than the details regarding its abortive Broadway run—affirm the dense interrelationship between Childress’s work as a playwright, actor, and director. For instance, in Childress’s words regarding the rehearsal process for the 1955 off-Broadway premiere production, Ernestine McClendon, the original actress cast as Wiletta, “wasn’t working” in the role, and neither were “the director and the play.”[18] Childress therefore stepped into the role of director and the former director, Clarice Taylor, took on the role of Wiletta. What might we gain by considering Childress’s and Taylor’s directorial and performance experience as integral to the character of Wiletta? Might the play’s central conflict be better understood not as one between a Black actor and an offstage white playwright but rather as one between Wiletta and her adversary, the white male director Al Manners, over directorial practices, performance methods, and the politics of the rehearsal room?
“Alice Childress’s Troubling Method” pursues these questions, so I will not recapitulate its arguments here in detail; instead, I will simply note that the rehearsal room and its practices have been sidelined by decades of scholarship on the play that focus primarily on the play’s commentary on the stereotypical roles written for Black actors by white playwrights. While this is a significant topic in Trouble in Mind, the “almost too much” emphasis on Wiletta-as-Childress-as-playwright has led to scholarship that goes so far as to refer to Wiletta as a “mouthpiece for Childress” and that makes Wiletta and the play’s other Black characters into Childress’s puppets—a reductive understanding of these roles that has unfortunately been perpetuated by more than one recent production of the play.[19] Perhaps more importantly, by sidelining the rehearsal room and placing the dramatist centerstage, such interpretations foreclose considerations of the theatrical practices and techniques necessary to uphold the rehearsal room’s racial, gendered, and classed power dynamics, the inequities between directors and actors, and the quotidian forms of white supremacy that enduringly structure US theatre making. Trouble in Mind thus offers performance scholars a rich case study for considering the complex interrelations between performance history and performance practice, particularly in our roles in producing, authorizing, and authenticating knowledge about past performances that, in turn, affect the imagination and realization of future performances.
[1] Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind, in Black Theater: A 20th Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, ed. Lindsay Patterson (Dodd, Mead, 1971), 137-74; Alice Childress, in Black Drama in America: An Anthology, second edition, ed. Darwin T. Turner (Howard University Press, 1994), 291-346; Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind, in Plays by American Women, ed. Judith E. Barlow (Applause, 1994), 467-542.
[2] In 2021, Trouble in Mind also received its Canadian premiere production at the Shaw Festival and another major UK production at the National Theatre in London. It has been sporadically produced at smaller US theatres such as: the Valencia Character Company in Orlando, Florida (1990); the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Washington (2013); the Two River Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey (2014); and PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (2015). The play has continued to be produced internationally following its Broadway premiere, including a 2024 production by the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. The recuperation of Childress has also prompted two additional publications of Trouble in Mind. See Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind, in Alice Childress: Selected Plays, ed. Kathy A. Perkins (Northwestern University Press, 2011), 47-114; Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind (Theatre Communications Group, 2022).
[3] Jesse Green, “‘Trouble in Mind,’ 66 Years Late and Still on Time,” review of Trouble in Mind, by Alice Childress, New York Times, November 18, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/theater/trouble-in-mind-review.html.
[4] On Childress’s vision of a Black “people’s theatre,” see Alice Childress, “For a Negro Theatre,” Masses & Mainstream 4, February 1951, 61-64; Alice Childress, “For a Strong Negro People’s Theatre,” Daily Worker, February 16, 1951, 11.
[5] As I note in my essay, a longstanding claim that Trouble in Mind won an OBIE Award is not corroborated by the American Theater Wing that issues such recognition. See “1956: Winners,” Obie Awards, https://www.obieawards.com/events/1950s/year-56. The Schomburg Center for Black Research houses Alice Childress’s papers, which contain a certificate dated 1955-1956 for “a special PAT-ON-THE-BACK’ award by Off Broadway for contributing substantially to the current improvement and artistic growth of American Theatre” (Alice Childress Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Box 8, File 1.)
[6] A[rthur]. G[elb]., “Play in Village Is Well Worth the Trip,” New York Times, November 5, 1955, 22.
[7] Both may be seen in Douglas Reside, “Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind in the Archives,” The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, November 18, 2021. https://www.nypl.org/bloMg/2021/11/18/alice-childress-trouble-mind-archive.
[8] The character “John Nevins” was originally listed in the playbill for the 1955 premiere production at the Greenwich Mews Theatre as “John Neville.” Douglas Reside, “Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind in the Archives,” The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, November 18, 2021. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/11/18/alice-childress-trouble-mind-archive.
[9] Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. “Hilda Haynes, James McMahon, Stephanie Elliot and Charles Bettis in rehearsal for the stage production Trouble in Mind.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 21, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/6bd8d4c0-29c4-0138-54f2-1d55f2d0636a.
[10] Maya Phillips, “Alice Childress Finally Gets to Make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway,” New York Times, November 3, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/theater/alice-childress-trouble-in-mind.html. Variations on this narrative sometimes also encompass the 1955 premiere of Trouble in Mind at the Greenwich Mews Theatre where Childress’s producers similarly insisted on a happy ending reconciling Wiletta with her white theatrical collaborators (Kathy A. Perkins, “Introduction,” in Alice Childress: Selected Plays, xxiv-xxv).
[11] Sam Zolotow, “ ‘Trouble in Mind’ Will Be Revived,” New York Times, February 8, 1957, 17. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1957/02/08/84950724.html?pageNumber=17.
[12] Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (Columbia University Press, 1969), 189-190.
[13] Perkins, “Introduction,” xxiv. The New York Times article directly cites Perkins severally.
[14] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Still for a Second: An Afterword,” in Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind (Theatre Communications Group, 2022), 100.
[15] “Dear White American Theater,” We See You W.A.T., June 8, 2020, https://www.weseeyouwat.com/statement.
[16] As I further demonstrate in my essay, this distortion also stems from frequently unexamined assumptions about the relationship between life and politics that contravene Childress’s clearly stated and deeply held political investments. To borrow the words of Sylvia Wynter, these conflations—of character and playwright, art and life—confuse the “map for the territory,” thereby inviting an overemphasis on the symptoms of white supremacy experienced by Childress personally at the expense of considerations of their systemic, structural cause dramatized in Childress’s play (Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon [Routledge, 2006], 107-169, at 118, see also 115).
[17] Roberta Maguire, “Alice Childress,” in The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (Rutgers University Press, 1995), 53.
[18] Maguire, Alice Childress,” 52.
[19] Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (Greenwood Press, 1988), 60.