![]() Cooper then gives us a brilliant, horrific aria, filled with Method detail, that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes, and at the same time makes you understand how much of America’s talent has been squandered. At one point, Sheldon, who spends most of “Chaos in Belleville” saying “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and whittling pointlessly at a stick, casually remarks that unlike that play’s author and director he has actually witnessed a lynching. At first confident that she can continue to game an unfair system, her Wiletta becomes almost existentially confused as insight floods in when finally she regains her clarity and resolves not to participate in her own degradation, it has the weight of both victory and defeat in one choice.īy then, we understand that “Trouble in Mind,” its title taken from a classic blues song about suicide, is, for all its backstage comedy, a tragedy of waste - not, like lynching, the waste of what happens so much as the waste of what doesn’t.Īll the Black characters, but none of the white ones, know that tragedy intimately. LaChanze gets that arc just right in a wonderfully rangy and compelling performance. Though he calls Wiletta “darling” and “my sweetheart,” his growing intransigence in response to her growing dissatisfaction is the primary source of conflict within the play. An egoist whose veneer of open-mindedness is easily stripped away, he regularly explodes in nasty snits that today would be understood (and yet perhaps tolerated) as big-man harassment. (Stephenson, though, is expert.) The ingénue complains that if “Chaos in Belleville” fails she’ll have to move back to her parents’ house in Connecticut, blithely unaware that Sheldon is probably one week’s salary short of homelessness.īut it is of course the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), who sits at the top of the pecking order, pecking away at everyone’s nerves. The journeyman, though not very good, never lacks for work. We see that even the most powerless of them - a put-upon stage manager (Alex Mickiewicz), a Yale-trained ingénue (Danielle Campbell) and a neurotic journeyman (Don Stephenson) - have more agency in their profession than any of the Black characters do. Some 66 years ago, that was precisely Childress’s question as well, and once the white characters appear it starts to get answered. The question they have been asking, in manifestoes and Twitter threads, is whether the systemic imbalance of power backstage is in any meaningful sense different from racism. If this seems extreme, read about the experiences of Black theater artists today. As a mostly Black cast assembles on a perfectly period set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) to begin rehearsing an “anti-lynching” melodrama called “Chaos in Belleville,” their high-spirited chatter is often about fabricated résumés, mutual acquaintances and glorious triumphs past. What begins as a backstage satire of white cluelessness and Black ingratiation gradually broadens and darkens into something far more mysterious: a peculiarly American tale of lost opportunity.īecause Childress uses the play’s structure to express her theme, the ingratiation naturally comes first, and Charles Randolph-Wright’s lively staging leads with warmth and humor. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway - a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” four years later - it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity.Īnd justice, both broadly and narrowly, is the point. Yet for sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress’s “ Trouble in Mind,” which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Like newspapers, too, they are remade every day when I caught up with “Thoughts of a Colored Man” recently, it had been updated with a hot take on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Whether despairing (“ Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“ Chicken & Biscuits”), broadly representative (“ Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“ Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life. So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. ![]()
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