Analysis
Like the blues song from which it takes its title, Trouble in Mind portrays the no-win plight of African Americans struggling to survive in a white racist society. Wiletta can survive as an artist only by lying. Her opening scene advice to John foreshadows her final heroic catastrophe. Her honest assertion of pride and intelligence after a lifetime of capitulation echoes the historic heroism of Rosa Parks, who chose to sit down on a segregated bus and who thus began the end of segregation. Childress forces the audience or reader to acknowledge that Wiletta’s courage is the toll that racism demands every day from African Americans who can be honest or survive but not both. As a bourgeois tragedy protest play, Trouble in Mind calls U.S. citizens to action.
Never simplistic in her presentation of racism, Childress never presents all black characters as good and all white characters as evil. On the contrary, she shows how racism negatively affects everyone. As in her other plays, she makes her political statements through a meticulous creation of realistic characters who experience a classical recognition and reversal that forces them to change and grow in the two-day span of a drama that comes close to observing Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. With compassion, she creates complex characters who exhibit painful contradictions.
Being cast in “Chaos” forces each of the five white characters to respond to daily racism in ways that exhibit their true mettle. Al Manners, who initially presents himself to the cast as a liberal fighting against racism, is unmasked, even to himself, as racist. At the outset, he wields directorial power and unexamined white privilege. Manipulative and condescending, he bolsters his ego...
(The entire section is 723 words.)