Trouble in Mind is a play about black actors rehearsing a pretentious, liberal, anti-lynching play written by whites, produced by whites, and directed by whites—it is a comedy and its humor is black. Writing in 1955 (three years before Genet's The Blacks), Alice Childress used the concentric circles of the play-within-the-play to examine the multiple roles blacks enact in order to survive. Twenty-three years later we can look at the play and see its double cutting edge: It predicts not only the course of social history but the course of black playwrighting. The plot is about an emerging rebellion begun as the heroine, Wiletta, refuses to enact a namby-Mammy, either in the play or for her director. The best parts of the play, its multi-leveled language and seething, funny role-enactments, prefigure the tough black style of '60s plays—naturalistic dramas that hit hard, inset with sermon-like arias for solo performers.
Hundreds of years of stereotyping are condensed in a few lines….
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