is the exact line from the script. This causes Wiletta much anxiety and is the beginning of her rebellion against Manners. Indeed, Wiletta’s desire to express an opinion on the play is the primary source of dramatic tension by act two.

From this scene, Manners immediately jumps back to the beginning of Chaos in act one, page three. Many of the attitudes and themes of the previous scene are reinforced. It opens with Ruby shelling beans on the back porch and her husband, Sam, played by Sheldon, sitting next to her. Their son, Job, played by John, enters. Job informs his mother that he is going to vote. Sam tries to discourage him, telling him that Renard has said to stay away from that. Job argues that he has been drafted and that another black man told him that ‘‘when that happens, a man’s sposed to vote and things.’’ Job goes despite his parents’ protests and feeble attempts to stop him. Carrie and Renard come out to see what is happening. Renard comments on how black people are worthless, while Carrie says she feels sorry for them. Before the reading ends, Carrie says, ‘‘If we’re superior we should prove it by our actions.’’

Like the servants in the play, who blindly follow what their white employer says without thinking for themselves, the older black actors advise John, the young, inexperienced actor, to agree with everything the white director and actors say, no matter what he really thinks. Wiletta especially believes it is the best way to get along, at least at the beginning of the play. But, unlike their Chaos counterparts, Wiletta, Sheldon, and Millie do express their discontent, however subtle. During this reading, Millie’s coldness and reactions disturb Judy so much that she cries Carrie would also cry over such a reaction. Like Carrie, Judy is sensitive and empathetic, but does not fully understand what the black actors feel reading this play. Judy and Carrie also ape their parents’ attitudes, with no real comprehension. Throughout the play, Judy talks about her close relationship to her parents and their beliefs. She says that her mother believes in integrated education. The Judge, like Manners, is full of himself and sure of his attitudes. This affects what Carrie thinks and says, since she does not display many thoughts that seem original.

The next discussion of Chaos in Belleville is not a full rehearsal but a description of the larger story. Some of the local African-American population will vote for the first time, and there is opposition from whites as well as blacks. In this atmosphere, the Judge does not want to have the barn dance. He, Sam, and Ruby believe that Job is headed for trouble. The focus turns to Ruby for a moment. Her anxieties over her son compel her to sing a well-known song. Wiletta knows the song and gives a moving rendition. It is not enough for Manners that she aced the song and understood what he wanted as a director; he wants to know what she was thinking, so he proceeds to humiliate her while playing a word association game. She sings the song again, and it is a bit better. Manners takes full credit for her ‘‘transformation’’ and dismisses the first effort entirely. Like the Judge, he wants to control everything. Such an attitude flames Wiletta’s discontent.

Act two of Trouble in Mind opens with a monologue from Chaos. It is a thundering speech given by Renard, played by the previously absent actor Bill O’Wray. In the speech, directed at other white citizens, Renard advocates a superficial ‘‘moderation’’ and ‘‘tolerance’’ for their black counterparts. He believes that this will ease tensions over voting and demonstrate their superior nature. Just as telling as this speech are the events that take place while it is being given. Eddie, Manners’s assistant, is supposed to play applause at key moments. He misses one cue, and at the end of the monologue, Manners tells Eddie that ‘‘Inattention aggravates the hell out of me!’’ Yet, in act two especially, Manners does not pay any attention to Wiletta’s concerns about the play or her need to talk about them.

The next piece of Chaos in Belleville rehearsed is the beginning of act three. Menial tasks are attended to while the air is filled with tension. Ruby irons clothes. Petunia anxiously looks out of the window. Sam sits in the corner and whittles a stick. Carrie cries. They all hear an angry lynch mob and wonder if Job is dead or alive. Fearing for her safety Ruby tries to send Carrie home, but Carrie will not hear of it. Instead, Carrie is determined to save Job’s life by getting her father and a judge to intercede. Sheldon says a prayer and Job shows up. Ruby tells him he should not have been so adamant about his right to vote. Job says he has done nothing wrong and he will run. Ruby believes he should give himself up to the mob and tell them he has done nothing wrong. Carrie wants to put him in the county jail for safekeeping. Renard shows up and offers his protection; Job takes it with his parents’ encouragement. Renard also makes Job admit that he has made a mistake. Job does so indirectly.

The only person capable of action in this scene is Renard. He is the benevolent superior who, while helpful, also wants to ensure his power is absolute. Carrie’s determination means nothing because she does nothing. Ruby, Petunia, and Sam are stereotypical, domestic characters, who rely solely on Renard’s judgement. Ruby is portrayed as incredibly naive in thinking that the mob would not kill her son because he is innocent, just as she would be supported by her friends. Job also believes he will be safe with the white man, though he will not be. He dies anyway, as revealed when the plot is further summarized for Sheldon who has not read the whole script. Unlike Renard, however, Manners cannot control every one. He cannot get Wiletta under control because he refuses to acknowledge her ideas and her need to express herself. To accomplish this goal, though, Manners does things like ‘‘playfully’’ threatening to spank her when she tries to talk to him. Still, Job goes along with Renard, just as John stops associating with the black actors and starts to act like Manners. Sam and Millie also vocalize their superficial support as well.

After a break for lunch, the cast returns and they back through parts of act three of Chaos. Job says he will still vote. Ruby wants to follow Carrie’s suggestion and have Job put in jail for safekeeping. Ruby directs Job to fall on his knees where she prays over him. This is the last moment of Chaos depicted before all hell breaks loose. At this point, Wiletta tries to deliver Ruby’s lines, but the sight of John on his knees upsets her. She keeps trying to get him to stand up, which angers Manners greatly. Wiletta seizes this opportunity to tell Manners that she does not believe that Ruby would send her son to the lynch mob. She says that it makes Ruby look like the villain, more than anyone else. The white audience would be superior because they know what the right course of action should be. This leads to a bitter discussion that reveals Manners to be racist and insensitive. The lesson from Job’s death is not the one the white playwright intended.

Unlike the other characters and actors, Wiletta undergoes a big transformation in Trouble in Mind because of Chaos in Belleville. She begins the play as a Ruby, bowing, at least on the surface, to Manners’s status as unquestionable leader. But ultimately, she is Job. She faces Manners’s wrath for daring to question him, as Job dares to vote. Job dies by the end of Chaos while Wiletta is probably out of a job. Wiletta is not dead, however, and vows to continue to fight. She will show up the next day so that Manners has to fire her to her face. Like Job, Wiletta’s actions are not fully supported by her peers. Sheldon wants Wiletta to apologize to Manners, which could be compared to Job being sent to the lynch mob by his mother. Wiletta chooses to be alone at the end of Trouble in Mind unlike anyone in Chaos in Belleville because she is stronger. The job, while important, does not compare to her victory.

Source: A. Petrusso, for Drama for Students, Gale, 2000.

‘‘Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of reality . . . the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.’’ Thus wrote James Baldwin in 1963, in an open letter to his nephew on the Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation. But he could have been summarizing the theme of Alice Childress’s 1956 play, Trouble in Mind, currently enjoying a belated British premiere at London’s Tricycle Theatre.

The play takes as its universe a theatre where rehearsals are under way for Chaos in Belleville, itself a play about the South after the Civil War. The characters in the play-within-a-play are familiar stereotypes: the white plantation owner; his liberal but misguided daughter; the faithful mammy; the maid; the good-for-nothing Uncle Tom, whittling a stick; and the rebel son. The storyline of Chaos purports to be a cry against injustice—whites recognizing the error of their ways when the rebel black youth is killed—but it is the plantation owner who takes credit for the change, so as to keep white reality intact.

Curiously, the actors who play the roles are themselves stereotypes, mid-twentieth-century versions of the characters they portray. There is the older white actor who refuses to eat with the black cast; the wealthy blonde Barbie doll; the conciliatory older actress and the younger, more spirited one; the toadying yes-man actor; and the bright young man, just out of college, looking for and expecting a better life. Their director, the aptly named Al Manners, admirably played by Maurice Roëves, is a white man who believes, ‘‘in principle’’, in black equality, but who fears disruption. ‘‘Social change’’, he argues, ‘‘takes time and tact.’’

The catalyst for discussion about social change is Wiletta Mayer (Carmen Munroe), a woman who, throughout her theatrical career, has toed the line, conformed to type (‘‘Whatever you say’’, she repeats, and ‘‘Don’t ask me ’cos I don’t know’’), but who ultimately refuses to do so when playing the role of the black mammy: demanded by the script to turn her son over to the white authorities, Wiletta refuses the act, the lines, and the part in Chaos in Belleville, if need be. And, as Baldwin warns, heaven and earth shake. The monologue Childress has written for Wiletta is rousing, but it is above all the fire and passion of Munroe’s splendid performance that make the production really worth seeing.

The script is strong and involving throughout, with only one truly mawkish moment (when Judy, the well-meaning white girl, turns to John, the young man, and cries, ‘‘You are a puppet with strings on. And so am I. Everyone’s a stranger and I’m the strangest of all!’’ before rushing from the stage); and the fine cast do it justice. It cannot be easy to play humanized stereotypes, as most of them are called upon to do; but, under the direction of Nicolas Kent, they succeed far better than do their characters in Chaos in Belleville.

Trouble in Mind cannot help, in some ways, feeling dated: stereotypes, both black and white, have changed more in the past thirty-five years than in the entire century before that. But, transmogrified, they have not disappeared, and the play is not without resonances and relevance today.

Source: Claire Messud. ‘‘Roles of Thunder’’ in Times Literary Supplement, no. 4673, October 23, 1992, p. 18.

The theme of rejecting stereotypes and of not compromising one’s integrity is further explored in Childress’ Trouble in Mind, which was produced at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York in 1955. Running for ninety-one performances, Trouble in Mind won for Childress the Obie Award for the best original off-Broadway play of the 1955–1956 season and was subsequently produced twice in 1964 by the BBC in London. When offered a Broadway option, Childress refused because the producer wanted her to make radical script changes. Alice Childress says of her rejection of the Broadway offer, ‘‘Most of our problems have not seen the light of day in our works, and much has been pruned from our manuscripts before the public has been allowed a glimpse of a finished work. It is ironical that those who oppose us are in a position to dictate the quality of our contributions’’ [Abramson].

Childress’ Trouble in Mind needed ‘‘pruning’’ because it is a satiric drama about white writers, producers, and directors who, because they are ignorant of blacks, support or defend inaccurate portraits. Childress insists in this drama that blacks must maintain their integrity and identity in the theater, refusing to accept roles that characterize them as exotic or half-human creatures, regardless of the monetary losses.

Making use of the play-within-a-play, Trouble in Mind is set on a Broadway stage where the characters rehearse Chaos in Belleville, a play written by a white about blacks. Wiletta Mayer, a veteran black actress, offends the sensibilities of the white director when she asserts that no black mother, as in Chaos in Belleville, would tell her son to give himself up to be lynched, regardless of his innocence or guilt. Appalled by other untruths, Wiletta announces that she will not perform unless some changes are made in the script. Because of her frankness, she is summarily dropped from the cast.

Trouble in Mind, Childress’ first professionally produced play outside of Harlem, received glowing reviews. Loften Mitchell, in Black Drama [1967], commented, ‘‘Now the professional theatre saw her outside of her native Harlem, writing with swift stabs of humor, her perception and her consummate dramatic gifts.’’ Equally laudatory is the assessment made by Arthur Gelb of the New York Times [5 November 1955], who says that Childress has ‘‘some witty and penetrating things to say about the dearth of roles for Negro actors in contemporary theatre, the cut-throat competition for these parts and the fact that Negro actors often find themselves playing stereotyped roles in which they cannot bring themselves to believe.’’

Source: Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. ‘‘Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange: Carving a Place for Themselves on the American Stage’’ in Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America, Greenwood, 1988, pp. 25–49.