Trouble In Mind should have debuted on Broadway in 1955. What happened?
How Alice Childress refused to compromise
Everything seemed to be going right for playwright Alice Childress.
Her debut full-length play Trouble in Mind ran for 91 performances off-Broadway in 1955, the New York Times called it “a fresh, lively and cutting satire,” and it was to be revived on Broadway the next year – until it all fell apart. It would be another 66 years until the show saw a Broadway stage.
What Childress experienced – and why the show didn’t make a Broadway debut during her lifetime – is something that Black artists still face to this day: interference from white producers and executives that renders the original art and intent unrecognizable.
This interference came in the ending of the play, as a white producer threatened to cancel the show if Childress did not change the ending to be more comforting to white audiences. The changes damaged the show, and critics took issue with the reworked ending, calling it “impassioned sermonizing” in contrast with the show’s “witty and penetrating” messages.
“I knew I was doing the wrong thing (by changing the show), but at the same time I shakily felt, ‘Maybe I could be wrong,’” Childress said in an interview for the 1995 book “The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists.”
Trouble in Mind is a play within a play as a troupe of actors stage a story about a lynching that brings conflict to the audience and into the rehearsal room. Lead actor Wiletta Mayer and director Al Manners argue over how to portray the show’s main character, a sharecropper’s wife, forcing Mayer to decide whether to accommodate the white director’s stereotypical vision. Childress’ original ending – the version that debuted on Broadway in 2021 and which will make its Pittsburgh debut at The Public this February – ends with Mayer and Manners at odds, forcing the show off the stage.
Childress’ revised ending, accommodating the white producers to ensure Trouble in Mind would go on, ended with a reconciliation between Mayer and Manners. Despite critics’ dislike of the new ending, the show was optioned for Broadway in 1956 – so long as Childress would complete even more rewrites.
“They had me rewrite for two years until I couldn’t recognize the play one way or the other,” Childress told historian James Hatch.
She eventually abandoned the project, unable to fulfill her artistic vision on a Broadway stage. Broadway stages would not see a play written by a Black woman until 1959 with Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” – and “Trouble in Mind” wouldn’t see its Broadway debut for another 66 years.
Now, Childress’ stunning backstage drama makes its Pittsburgh debut this February at Pittsburgh Public Theater, on stage Feb. 5–23, 2025 – complete with the vision she had at the start. Tickets are now on sale at PPT.org/Trouble or by calling 412.316.1600.