Andrew Broderick and Alana Bridgewater in Trouble in Mind, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s 1957, day 1 of rehearsal for a new Broadway melodrama with an anti-lynching message. And in the opening scene of Trouble in Mind a veteran Black actress is giving pre-rehearsal pointers to a young Black newcomer in the cast about dealing with the white “management.”

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“White folks can’t stand unhappy Negroes,” Wiletta tells him. “Laugh! Laugh at everything they say, makes ‘em feel superior….” She knows something about survival in showbiz — mainly that it isn’t The Theatre, “it’s just a business. Coloured folks ain’t in no theatre.”

One of the most striking things about Trouble in Mind, the slow burn of a 1955 play by the Black American playwright Alice Childress, is that its own history as a play about the link between power and racism in theatre runs disturbingly parallel to its fictional story. After premiering in a tiny Greenwich Village house, Trouble in Mind, named for a 1924 blues song, was en route to Broadway, where it would have been the first-ever play by a Black woman to arrive there. But the playwright refused to make the changes to the ending demanded by white producers. And that was that — for the next 70 or so years. Until 2021 revivals on Broadway and at the Shaw Festival rescued it from obscurity.

Trouble in Mind, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Now it’s on the Citadel mainstage, a co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre that arrives after a Winnipeg run. And Cherissa Richards’ vivid production, beautifully costumed in period detail by Sarah Uwadiae, reinforces the startling topicality of its ’50s provocations after all this time. Trouble in Mind has a sharp ear for the passive-aggressive mixed signals of power that, along with the progressive cadences of liberal hypocrisy about ‘authenticity’, camouflage racism.

Sure the play “stinks,” says Wiletta (Alana Bridgewater) with a ‘what-did-you-expect?’ shrug, advising her earnest young cast-mate John (Andrew Broderick) to avoid giving his “honest opinion” if it’s solicited by the white director.

The status quo is set forth in Act I by the arrival of the cast, in a rehearsal room full of mismatched theatre detritus from productions long gone (a handsomely convincing design by Cory Sincennes, lighted by Kevin Humphrey in tones of theatrical nostalgia). On opening night, I found the self-dramatizing, heightened quality of the performances at the outset a bit overheated, in truth. The characters seemed to be talking to the audience and not each other (true, they’re ‘theatre people’, congenitally vivacious, but still …).

But there’s sharp humour of the wincing kind in the jostle and backchat. The Black actors have learned to accommodate to white assumptions, hierarchy and smug complacency about stereotypes — not to mention honkers like Chaos in Belleville, which purports to be an important and powerful anti-racism oeuvre because, hey, it’s against lynching.

Jodi Kristjanson, Andrew Broderick, Alana Bridgewater in Trouble in Mind. Photo by Nanc Price.

Millie (Reena Jolly, in an amusingly sassy performance) arrives in a mink coat, deploring the sheer amount of time she’s spent onstage in baggy cotton dresses and bandanas. In the last play she was in, “all I did was shout ‘Lawd have mercy’ for two hours every night.” The elderly Sheldon (Alvin Sanders, who’s terrific) needs the money, and is prepared to spend scene after scene “whittling a stick” to keep it coming in. And there are jokes about the kind of names Black characters typically get, Gardenia, Magnolia, Chrysanthemum, Pearl.

The white director Al Manners is a pretentious Hollywood type making his Broadway debut and his mark, he thinks, with this anti-lynching play. Geoffrey Pounsett captures to a T the glib faux-collegial condescension of the guy, giving preposterously contradictory acting instructions, dealing in flattering endearments one second and imperious when crossed.

Geoffrey Pounsett in Trouble in Mind, Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

He’s no prince with the white underlings  — his cowed stage manager Eddie (Oscar Derkx), the ‘well-meaning’ white ingenue Judi (Jodi Kristjanson) who’s been to Yale, the ancient Irish janitor (Glenn Nelson), the white leading man, a soap opera hack (Alex Poch-Goldin) who finds any excuse not to eat lunch with the Black cast-mates. But he saves his particular sneering self-aggrandizement for Wiletta.

She’s been playing minor roles for years in plays where Black characters burst into song at traumatic moments. And, though in love with the theatre, she considers herself a realist: “It’s the  man’s play, the man’s money, and the man’s theatre, so what you gonna do?”

Alana Bridgewater in Trouble in Mind, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price

And then, gradually she does know what to do; she comes to the end of waiting. And her growing perplexity at the direction, then her dissatisfaction with the play, is the central arc of the piece. And it’s thoughtfully, smartly charted by Bridgewater. The performance has the kind of natural stage presence that makes you realize, as per the play itself, that the theatre hasn’t known how to appreciate how much talent and time have been wasted.

The play, and Richards’ production, builds up a head of steam until the terrible revelation that Sheldon, getting coached by white management on how to be authentically Black, has seen an actual lynching. Sanders makes the memory live. And then there’s explosive moment when Wiletta, who’s had a lifetime of sucking it up and backing down, just won’t do either any more. And the self-congratulatory liberalism of the director, a spokesman for “honesty” and “truth” onstage, peels off. “There’s more to this life than the truth.” It’s an explosive show-stopper of a speech about white neediness and privilege, tone-deaf and loud. And Pounsett nails it.

So a play about the theatre starts with a seasoned Black actress in love with theatre, standing onstage in the glow of the ghost light, and looking up, dreamily, at the balcony. She’s savouring the magic, “a theatre always makes me feel that way.”

By the end Wiletta is declaring “I’ve always wanted to do something real grand … in the theatre.” She says “we have to go further and do better.” And the old electrician turns on the machine that dispenses canned applause, the sort of bottled skepticism that has lasted 70 years and isn’t going to go away any time soon, ‘progressive’ liberal protestations notwithstanding.

It’s a show you don’t forget.

REVIEW

Trouble in Mind

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Alice Childress

Starring: Alana Bridgewater, Geoffrey Pounsett, Andrew Broderick, Oscar Derkx, Reena Jolly, Jodi Kristjanson, Glenn Nelson, Alvin Sanders, Alex Poch-Goldin

Running: through April 16

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com