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When Pittsburgh Public Theater announced its 2024-25 season last March, the line-up included the local premiere of “Trouble in Mind,” famed Black playwright Alice Childress’ satiric 1955 drama about race in the American theater.
The Public couldn’t have known that in the very week this 70-year-old play would debut — this week — the term “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion, would be among the biggest buzzwords in the nation.
Good art, it seems, can be both of its time and well ahead of it.
“Trouble in Mind,” set in the mid-’50s, depicts a Broadway troupe’s rehearsals for an anti-lynching play titled “Chaos in Belleville.” “Trouble” is an ensemble piece, but its central conflict is between the veteran Black lead, Wiletta Mayer, and white director Al Manners over the nominally progressive white “Chaos” playwright’s depiction of Black characters from the rural South.
The “Trouble” script is funny and smart, and save for a few topical references, it barely dates.
It’s “eerie how relevant it still is,” says Justin Emeka, who’s directing for the Public.
It’s been nearly five years since hundreds of theater-makers of color signed, “We See You, White American Theater,” an open letter decrying ongoing racism in the industry. With caustic wit, “Trouble in Mind” dramatizes many issues from the ’50s but with us still, including the difficulty Black actors have getting work, the often limited nature of the roles they do get, offhand disrespect, and the need to assuage the egos of white producers, white directors and white actors.
After its premiere Off-Broadway, “Trouble” was set to debut on Broadway. But Childress refused to submit to pressure to give the play a happier ending. (Childress would have been the first Black woman playwright produced on Broadway; instead, that honor went to Lorraine Hansberry, with 1959’s “A Raisin in the Sun.”)
“Trouble in Mind” is a great backstage play, and it’s true that some of the dysfunctions Childress depicts are endemic to life in the theater. (The South Carolina native began her career as an actress, after all.) Emeka, who is Black, said during rehearsals he keeps “running into Manners” – glimpsing little pieces of the autocratic white director in himself. The plot eventually turns on a debate about acting styles, which in the 1950s were changing rapidly.
But in “Trouble,” the pervasiveness of racial inequality, no less than backstage dynamics, requires each character to play a part even when he or she is not formally acting.
“When can they show their full self, and when do they have to put on a mask for someone else’s benefit?” Emeka says. Childress, he says, explores “how we see ourselves as evidenced by how we perform ourselves.”
Which brings us back to DEI. Creating an atmosphere where one can “bring one’s full self” to the workplace is one goal of DEI initiatives — the very programs meant to fight all kinds of systemic bias, and which are now under attack by the Trump administration and its allies.
At the Public, rehearsals were well underway as President Donald Trump was, without evidence, blaming “DEI” for a deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C.
Emeka notes that such backlash is nothing new. One could cite anything from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter.
“This feeling of threat [from] Black and brown cultural advancement” always leads to the idea that one person’s, or group’s, gain must be another’s loss, Emeka says.
And DEI practices are being vilified by the same people who, he says, nominate “absolutely unqualified” people for high office and never see the irony.
Emeka, who graduated from Oberlin College in 1995, is a professor of theater and Africana studies there. Before becoming the Public’s first resident director, he amassed directing credits Off-Broadway and with regional companies, and he’s known for his cross-cultural adaptations of Shakespeare, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Harlem.”
I asked Emeka whether, during his career, theater had moved forward on the issues dramatized in “Trouble in Mind.”
“Things are kind of constantly changing,” he answered. “We are an evolving people, we are an evolving culture. … We make progress while never reaching completion.”
“Trouble in Mind” stars Shinnerrie D. Jackson as Wiletta, Joseph McGranahan as Manners, and features Hope Anthony, Emma Brown Baker, Garbie Dukes, Martin Giles, Daniel Krell, Anthony Marino and Vandous Stripling II.
The first preview performance at the O’Reilly Theater is Wed., Feb. 5, and the formal opening is Saturday. The show runs through Feb. 23.
